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THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

THE LYMAN BEECHER LECTURES ON 
PREACHING AT THE YALE SCHOOL OF RELIGION 

FOR 1916 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



THE 
GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

AS REVEALED IN CONTEMPORARY 
SCRIPTURES 



BY 
WILLIAM DeWITT HYDE 

PRESIDENT OF BOWDOIN COLLEGE 



"The democratic mind attempts to apply to every moral issue its 
tests of justice-giving, service, and social solidarity." 

— Shailer Matthews. 



Hett) gorfe 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1916 

A a rights reserved 



.mi 



Copyright, 1916, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and elcctrotypcd. Published March, 1916. 



Norluoati ifress 

J. S. Gushing Cp. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass--^U.S.A. 

€/^ 
MAR 30 1916 



5CI,A427450 






>4 



1 



FRANK H. DECKER 

MINISTER OF CHURCH HOUSE, PROVIDENCE, R.I. 

IN WHOSE HEART AND ON WHOSE LIPS THE GOSPEL 

OF GOOD WILL LIFTS THOSE WHO NEED IT 

MOST INTO A HAPPY FELLOWSHIP IN 

CHRIST'S EXPERIENCE OF GOD 



PREFACE 

This book, taking for granted the technical devices 
of preaching, goes straight to the heart of the Gospel to 
be preached and practiced : — the Gospel that Christ 
expects men to be great enough to make the good of all 
affected by their action, the object of their wills, as it 
is of the will of God. 

The Christian is not a ^'plaster saint'' who holds 
"safety first" to be the supreme spiritual grace; but 
the man who earns and spends his money, controls his 
appetites and passions, chooses peace or war, and does 
whatever his hand finds to do, with an eye single to the 
greatest good of all concerned. 

Sin is falling short of this high, heroic aim; and the 
preacher's business is to make men ashamed of it, as 
the low, mean thing it is. 

The instant a man who has done wrong repents, 
God and all ChristUke men welcome him back to their 
favor and fellowship. 

To the Christian every secular vocation is an oppor- 
tunity to express Good Will : and sacrifice is the price 

he gladly pays for the privilege. 

vii 



f 



VIU PREFACE 

The wise Christian preacher will not as preacher 
become the mere partisan on one side or the other of 
disputed questions of political, social, and moral reform : 
but will commend such Good Will and condemn such 
evil will as there is on both sides. 

Christian character and Christian virtues come not 
by direct cultivation, but as by-products of Good Will 
expressed in daily life. The Church, a superfluous 
superstition when considered as an appendage to an 
untransformed secular life, or a preparation for an unde- 
fined happiness hereafter, is a precious and sacred instru- 
ment for transforming men and institutions into sons 
and servants of Good Will. 

As the expert interpreter of the Gospel of Good Will : 
as the leader in the fight against all meanness and cruelty : 
as the restorer of the penitent : as the infuser of spirit- 
ual meaning into secular life : as the champion of costly 
sacrifice: as the challenger of social injustice and the 
non-partisan herald of social reform: as the officer of 
a church that derives its sanctity and unity from the 
efiiciency with which it serves all forms of personal and 
social welfare, — the Christian minister has a mission 
beneficent beyond all others. 

These lessons are drawn from and illustrated by texts 
and extracts from twentieth-century literature: not 



PREFACE IX 

devotional, theological, evangelistic, or missionary books, 
but secular literature that is saturated with the essen- 
tial Christian Spirit of Good Will. 

For kind permission to quote these texts and lessons 
from '^ Contemporary Scriptures " I make grateful ac- 
knowledgments to the following authors and publishers : 

Mr. Jerome K. Jerome, for ^' The Passing of the Third 
Floor Back " (page i) ; Mr. Charles Rann Kennedy and 
Harper and Brothers, for '^ The Servant in the House " 
(page 162) ; D. Apple ton and Company, for Thomas 
Mott Osborne's " Within Prison Walls " (page 80) ; The 
Houghton Mifflin Company, for John Graham Brooks' 
^^An American Citizen" (page 108); J. B. Lippincott 
Company, for Charles Sarolea's ^' How Belgium Saved 
Europe" (page 135); Dodd, Mead and Company, for 
John Hopkins Dennison's ^' Beside the Bowery " (page 
20) ; and The Macmillan Company, for John Mase- 
field's "The Everlasting Mercy" and " The Widow in 
the Bye Street " (page 45) ; Jacob Riis' " The Making 
of an American," and ''The Battle With the Slum" 
(page 191) ; and Winston Churchill's "The Inside of 
the Cup" (page 217). 

These texts and extracts are introduced to show that 
this Gospel of Good Will is a Gospel which is being 
preached effectively in the poems and plays, the biog- 



X PREFACE 

raphies and histories, the speeches and novels of the 
day, and should be preached in the pulpit. 

In Chapters II and III, I have introduced a few pas- 
sages from my book on ^^ Sin and its Forgiveness." 
For some things put in, and for more left out, I am in- 
debted to the criticism of Dr. Charles T. Burnett and 
Dr. Chauncey W. Goodrich. 

Why the Gospel of Good Will? Why not the Gospel 
of God ; the Gospel of Christ ; or the Gospel of the 
Spirit ? 

Because for many of us God is a far-off, forbidding 
being; Christ has become sentimental and external; 
the Spirit has come to stand for something vague and 
mystical. 

Readers of whom this is not true ; readers to whom 
God is a Father whose trusted, wise benevolence makes 
the doing of hard duty a dehght ; Christ an ever present 
companion whose friendship makes unselfish living easy ; 
the Spirit an inward guide whose perpetual suggestions 
make kindliness of attitude and act a second nature; 
are advised to substitute for Good Will, wherever it 
occurs, the one of these more obviously personal terms 
which means most to them. 

On the other hand, to those who find these terms beset 
with misconceptions, and are willing to risk apparent 



PREFACE XI 

temporary abandonment of them, I think I can promise 
that at the end of our Kttle journey they will come back 
to find these personal terms defined and deepened, ex- 
panded and enriched. 

For Good Will is not an impersonal abstraction float- 
ing in empty air. It is the fundamental attribute of 
God; the essential nature of Christ; the characteristic 
quality of the Spirit : and whoever lives in Good Will 
thereby becomes a son or daughter of God, a brother or 
sister of Christ, a disciple and friend of the Spirit. 

William Dewitt Hyde. 

BowDOiN College, Brunswick, Maine, 
January i, 1916. 



INTRODUCTION 

There are two approaches to the Christian life. One 
is the critical investigation of the traditions in which 
that life is historically enshrined. The results of this 
investigation are at first startlingly negative, and seem 
to take away the foundations of Christianity. Yet 
followed through they reveal underneath the founda- 
tion which they remove an even firmer foundation in 
the eternal ideal of Good Will which the prophets par- 
tially proclaimed, law negatively declared, Christ per- 
fectly embodied, and the early Christians enthusiasti- 
cally reproduced. One finds this admirably done in 
such a book as William F. Bade's ^^The Old Testament ^ 
in the Light of To-day." 

The other method is to ask, not through the critical 
examination of ancient tradition and ecclesiastical au- 
thority, but directly through the life and literature of 
the present day what are the supreme values which men 
are expressing and admiring in the plays and poems, 
the biographies and histories, the speeches and novels 
of this twentieth century. This method has all the 
pleasure and peril of plowing virgin soil on an unexplored 
frontier. 

xiii 



XIV INTRODUCTION 

It neither denies nor affirms the results as such of 
Biblical and historical criticism. In so far as tradition 
proves false and authority unfounded, so long as we are 
true to our present highest ideal of Good Will, we can 
get along just as well without as with the historical 
tradition. And in so far as the verified tradition and 
our present insight coincide, each has reason to be grate- 
ful for the confirmation of the other. 

Both to those whom criticism has robbed of cherished 
features of the traditional Gospel and to those to 
whom criticism has given back the essentials of their 
faith, the new method brings a positive and practicable 
Gospel. Wisdom is justified of all her children. 

We are passing through a revolution in religious 
thought. The old terms remain : but with new mean- 
ings and new emphasis. The old views had at least 
the merit of clearness. The preacher knew precisely 
what to preach : and the layman knew how to put the 
preaching into practice. The new views have not yet 
become equally precise. Not every preacher who holds 
them knows how to make them clear to his congrega- 
tion : and not every one in the congregation who hears 
them preached is quite clear about the manner of Hfe 
for which they call. 

As this book aims to make the new views as clearly 



( 



INTRODUCTION XV 

preachable and as precisely practicable as the old, the 
natural introduction to them is a contrast, as sharp and 
as extreme as possible, between the old and the new views. 

God used to be regarded as somewhat arbitrary : not 
deigning to justify his ways by the perfect standard 
of what human goodness at its best prompts us to say 
and do in our relations with our fellows : but laying down 
laws and penalties, drawing up plans and schemes, 
which seemed to have as their primary aim divine satis- 
faction rather than human welfare. 

To-day our deeper grasp of the Spirit of Jesus, and our 
fuller appreciation of its great practical corollary, 
democracy, has taught us to measure God by at least 
as high a standard as that which we apply to ourselves. 
This makes God a Being altogether light in whom there 
is no darkness at all : not arbitrary will but Good Will 
becomes the essence of his nature : and when we seek 
to know His Will we ask not merely what was revealed to 
and believed by the harder hearts of twenty or twenty-five 
centuries ago, but what a Will which seeks the compre- 
hensive best for each and all to-day expects us to be and 
do, in the concrete and complex situations in which we 
modern men are placed — situations infinitely more 
delicate and difl&cult than anything of which the most 
inspired of the ancients every dreamed. 



XVI INTRODUCTION 

Eight lectures cannot cover the whole of the preacher's 
message. I have selected and arranged in logical order 
the eight commissions which seem to me most vital. 

The preacher's first task is to develop in his people 
the habit of asking in every relationship of life, not what 
is profitable, not what is pleasurable, not what is respect- 
able, not what is lawful : but what does the Will that 
wills the best for all : — what does Good Will in this 
precise situation require. To train people to ask that 
question every day and hour of their lives : and once or 
twice a week to give them guidance and inspiration 
toward some of the answers to it, is the preacher's most 
comprehensive commission. He is not merely the 
repeater and commentator of a message once for all 
delivered to the saints : but the prophet of a message 
that is forever as new and original as the changing 
situations and unfolding capacities of men. 

The thing the preacher and layman ahke have to fight, 
then, is not sin in the old, abstract sense of defiance of 
an arbitrary God, disobedience of his sovereign com- 
mands, and disregard of the elaborate terms upon 
which he has offered us abstract salvation: but the 
meanness that seeks anything less than that best for 
all which Good Will is ever seeking; the selfishness 
which falls so far short of Good Will for all that it will 



INTRODUCTION XVll 

take gain and pleasure for self, or self and friends, at 
cost of avoidable loss and pain for others and for all. 
To show mean and selfish persons how mean and selfish 
they are, and make them heartily ashamed of their 
greed and lust, malice and hatefulness, laziness and 
self-indulgence, censoriousness and hardheartedness, is 
the preacher's second commission. 

Mean and contemptible as selfishness is, however, 
the selfish man is mean and contemptible no longer than 
he clings to his selfishness. The instant he is ashamed 
of it, and sorry for the injury it is to others ; wishing 
that instead of the mean thing he said, or did, he had 
risen to the noble height of Good Will for all — that 
instant, not by special arrangement, but in the nature of 
the case, because we would do it ourselves, and God is 
at least as good as we are at our best, the man who has 
been mean and selfish is forgiven, and welcomed to the 
favor of God and the fellowship of all who in the Christ- 
like spirit share and serve Good Will. To assure the 
penitent of this free and full forgiveness of God, and 
to secure for him the practical, social expression of that 
forgiveness by all Christian men and women, is the 
preacher's third commission. 

Good Will is not chiefly manifested for us once for all 
in miracle: or repeated for us in sacramental magic. 



XVIU INTRODUCTION 

It is manifested in the life and character of Jesus Christ 
far more fully than in the alleged manner of his birth 
or the method of his resurrection : in the conduct and 
spirit of the daily lives of Christian men and women, 
far more than in ecclesiastical rites and ceremonies : 
and is to be manifested most acceptably and trium- 
phantly in the transformation of all secular vocations into 
expressions of friendliness and service to all whom they 
directly and remotely affect. To show, not in technical 
detail, which for the most part is beyond his powers, 
but in aim and principle how to make each Christian 
man's vocation an expression of Good Will for him, in 
him, and through him for the benefit and blessing of 
the world, is the preacher's fourth commission. 

Good Will involves not merely once for all in Jesus 
Christ, but perpetually and universally in every disciple 
who shares it, the sacrifice of whatever individual prefer- 
ence, pleasure or profit is inconsistent with it. Up to 
the limit of his strength and influence, so far as is con- 
sistent with maximum efficiency in his specific station 
and function, every Christian man must bear his share 
of the suffering incidental to a finite world of natural 
law and human freedom : and consequent on the per- 
versity of individuals and the corruption and imperfec- 
tion of civic and social institutions. Sacrifice is the cost 



INTRODUCTION XIX 

of service : each form of service has its specific price in 
sacrifice : and to train his people to pay the price and 
make the sacrifice cheerfully and bravely, yet not 
excessively or unreasonably, is the preacher's fifth 
commission. 

A man who makes his life expressive of Good Will 
thereby becomes not merely saved and assured of an 
abundant entrance into a future heaven : but becomes 
transformed by the renewing of his mind so as to show 
forth here and now that perfect and acceptable Will 
in specific traits of character and qualities of conduct. 
To show what these are, and how they come, not so 
much through explicit cultivation but as by-products 
of a mind and heart devoted day by day, year after 
year, to Good Will, is the Christian preacher's sixth 
commission. 

The State, the economic order, the family and the 
international world order are spheres, not of supernatural 
conflict of God and the Devil, but spheres which are 
the resultants of much natural selfishness and an ever 
increasing volume of Christian Good Will. To live 
in them, patient with their imperfections so far as they 
are for the present inevitable ; yet ever making his own 
contribution to them pure, and just and generous and 
beneficent: dwelling at the same time sorrowfully 



XX INTRODUCTION 

in the unavoidable injustices and oppressions, joyfully 
in the coming purity and justice and generosity and 
love of the world that is to be, and which all Christian 
men are helping to bring in, is his seventh commission. 

The Bible, the Sabbath, the Sacraments, the Church, 
Missions and the Ministry are not as formerly con- 
sidered, supernatural institutions of mystical and magi- 
cal efficacy to work moral miracles independently of 
the transformation and cooperation of character: but 
they are useful and essential and therefore holy and 
sacred means for the cultivation, and propagation of 
Good Will. To make men appreciate and reverence 
them, not for their traditional and fictitious, but for 
their present-day and instrumental value, is the eighth 
of the preacher's commissions. 

A man who signs himself "A Student In Arms," 
writing from the trenches in Flanders to the Spectator 
of December i8, 191 5, describes so accurately the prob- 
lem of the preacher, and the solution of it set forth in 
this book, that it may well serve as the conclusion of our 
introduction. 

^^The soldier, and in this case the soldier means 
the working man, does not in the least connect the things 
he really believes in with Christianity. He thinks that 
Christianity consists in believing the Bible and setting 



INTRODUCTION XXI 

up to be better than your neighbors. By believing the 
Bible he means believing that Jonah was swallowed by 
the whale. By setting up to be better than your neigh- 
bors he means not drinking, not swearing, and preferably 
not smoking, being close-fisted with your money, avoid- 
ing the companionship of doubtful characters, and refusing 
to acknowledge that such have any claim upon you. 

"This is surely nothing short of tragedy. Here were 
men who beUeved absolutely in the Christian virtues 
of unselfishness, generosity, charity and humility, with- 
out ever connecting them in their minds with Christ; 
and at the same time what they did associate with 
Christianity was just on a par with the formalism and 
smug self-righteousness which Christ spent His whole 
life in trying to destroy. 

"The chaplains as a rule failed to reahze this. They 
remonstrated with their hearers for not saying their 
prayers, and not coming to Communion, and not being 
afraid to die without making their peace with God. 
They did not grasp that the men really had deep-seated 
beliefs in goodness, and that the only reason why they 
did not pray and go to Communion was that they never 
connected the goodness in which they believed with the 
God in Whom the chaplains said they ought to believe. 
If they had connected Christianity with unselfishness 



XXU INTRODUCTION 

and the rest, they would have been prepared to look to 
Christ as their Master and their Savior. I am certain 
that if the chaplain wants to be understood and to win 
their sympathy he must begin by showing them that 
Christianity is the explanation and the justification and 
the triumph of all that they now do really believe in. 
He must start by making their religion articulate in a 
way which they will recognize. He must make them 
see that his creeds and prayers and worship are the sym- 
bols of all that they admire most, and most want to be.'' 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Gospel of Good Will: Christ's Expecta- 
tion OF Men I 

II. Falling Short of Good Will: The Meanness 

OF Sin . 46 

III. Restoration to Good Will: Repentance and 

Forgiveness 80 

IV. Good Will in Secular Vocations: Service . 108 
V. The Cost of Good Will: Sacrifice . . .135 

VI. By-Products of Good Will: The Christian 

Virtues 162 

VII. Good Will in Society: Reform . . . .191 
VIII. Fellowship in Good Will: The Church . . 217 



XXIU 



THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 



THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL: CHRIST'S EXPECTA- 
TION OF MEN 

"You have always taken it for granted, sir, in all our conver- 
sations, that I was a fine feUow, in sympathy with fine ideals. 
But that is not what surprises me : it is to find — that you are 
right." Jerome K. Jerome, The Passing of the Third Floor Back, 
p. 190. 

Our lesson for to-day is from ^^The Passing of the 
Third Floor Back"; the text is the remark of a Jew 
converted from cunning trickery to frank honesty. This 
play is the drama of conversion by expectation; re- 
generation by appreciation. It portrays the influence of 
The Stranger, who is Christ, on as unpromising a lot 
of persons as ever gathered together in a boarding house. 
The Prologue shows us a satyr, a coward, a bully, a 
shrew, a hussy, a rogue, a cad, a cat, a snob, a slut, 
a cheat, and a passer-by, The Stranger, — Christ. 



2 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

In the Epilogue we meet these same individuals again, 
yet with all their objectionable characteristics gone: 
we meet them as a generous old bachelor; two pure 
lovers; a devoted husband and wife; an honorable 
Jew ; an entertaining party ; a self-respecting maiden 
lady ; a generous rich aunt ; an important person ; the 
refined lady of the house, and The Stranger who now 
is the friend of them all. 

How has The Stranger-friend, the Christ, wrought 
this wonderful transformation? By seeing and re- 
vealing to each one of them his or her ideal. In the 
grasping lodging-house keeper he sees and reveals the 
generous lady she really is ; unwilling to charge him as 
much as he is able and willing to pay. In a powdered, 
painted, giggling, gushing, silly simpleton he sees and 
reveals a ^^ clever, witty, beautiful, graceful, comely 
woman, perhaps a little pale — there are white roses 
and red — with delicate features on which the sculptor 
Thought has chiselled his fine lines, giving to them char- 
acter, distinction; her still-bright eyes unspoilt; with 
her fit crown of soft brown hair that time has touched 
with no unkindly hand." 

To see how the change is wrought, however, we 
must give not mere extracts, but in two or three cases 
the whole conversation. 



Christ's expectation of men 3 

First, The Stranger has a friendly talk with Harry 
Larkcom, a low, ill-mannered, mercenary fellow who 
has just been trying to make an assignation with the 
servant girl in return for a gift of imitation emeralds. 

The Stranger 
How well you play ! 

Larkcom 
{Ee swings round on his stool) Hullo ! — you there, 
old cockerlor — {He encounters The Stranger's eyes. 
Somehow they put him out of countenance?) Think so? 

The Stranger 
You have the touch of one who loves music. 

Larkcom 
Here. (He rises ^ grins up into The Stranger's face.) 
What's the Uttle game? Want to borrow money? 

The Stranger 

You see, it would be of no use. You see through me 

at once. 

Larkcom 

(The Stranger is smiling. He turns away, ashamed 
of himself) Only my bit of fun. {By way of explana- 
tion). My weak spot — anybody telling me I know 
anything about music. Here, of course — {With 



4 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

disgust.) Ah! All they understand here is '^Tumpty, 

tumpty, turn." 

The Stranger 

And so you give them — what they understand. 

Larkcom 

Oh well! somebody's got to do something to liven 

things up a bit. 

The Stranger 

Ah ! yes. (He puts a hand on the lad^s shoulder.) Some 
kind, good-natured body. 

Larkcom 
Oh well ! it comes easy — and I like doing it. 

The Stranger 

Yes. 

Larkcom 

(There is something about The Stranger that invites 
confidence.) My idea was to have been an entertainer. 

The Stranger 

It was a good idea. You would have succeeded, I 

am sure. 

Larkcom 

You see, I've got a voice. 



Christ's expectation of men 5 

The Stranger 

And you have humour and a sense of fun, one reads 
it in your eyes. 

Larkcom 

{Suspicious for an instant — till he looks into The 

Stranger's eyes) That's right. Why, sometimes — 

when I like to take the trouble — I'll have 'em all roimd 

me here laughing. Not an easy crowd to start, mind 

you. 

The Stranger 

It is your vocation. It would be wrong of you to 

waste your gifts. 

Larkcom 

Question is, would it pay ? 

The Stranger 
I think it would. And then, that is not the only 
question, is it? You would be giving pleasure to so 

many. 

Larkcom 

"Giving." Here, don't you nm away with the no- 
tion that Harry Larkcom is a philanthropist. What's it 
going to put into Uttle Harry's money-box? {He slaps 
his pocket) That's the question little Harry always 
asks himself. 



THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 



The Stranger 
Always ? Are you sure ? 



Larkcom 



Ami 



The Stranger 
You play them ^'Tumpty, tumpty, tum/' Why? 

Larkcom 
Why ! Because — 

The Stranger 

Does it give you any pleasure — you, a musician! 
Does it add anything to the ^^ money-box"? {The lad 
stares,) No. You do it because you are just a good 
fellow. You will have them all around you, laughing. 
Wherever you are, Ufe shall be a little brighter; dull, 
tired faces shall be made to smile. You give them — 
so much more than money. You give them — yourself. 
Don't you call that being a philanthropist? 

Larkcom 
Of course, you can put it that way. 

The Stranger 
What other way ? 



Christ's expectation of men 7 

Larkcom 
I do like seeing people jolly round about me ; hearing 
them whisper to one another that Harry Larkcom's the 
Hf e and — Gar on ! Who are you getting at ? — you 
and your philanthropists ! I just like their admiration 
and applause. That's all I do it for. 

The Stranger 

Their gratitude, their appreciation. Are you not 

entitled to it? 

Larkcom 

You are determined — 

The Stranger 

The thanks of those you serve : that is the true "pay" 

of the artist. 

Larkcom 

Here. Am I an artist now ? 

The Stranger 
And the artist is always a philanthropist, serving his 
fellow-men, not only for the sake of the money-box. 

Larkcom 
I wonder. My old mother always would put it that 
way. "Harry's never so happy," she would say, "as 
when he's making other people happy." 



8 the gospel of good will 

The Stranger 

Ah ! She knew you. She would have been so proud 

of you. 

Larkcom 

Well, it would be better than the sort of jobs I'm 

doing now. 

The Stranger 

You will forgive me. I have seen it so often. You 

artists are never content doing any other work than 

your own. All the rest is waste of time. 

Larkcom 
Would you mind one day my trying over one or two 
little things of my own on you ? 

The Stranger 
I should be delighted. 

Larkcom 
Honour bright? 

The Stranger 

Honour bright! It will be pleasant — looking back 

— to think that I perhaps was of help to you in the 

beginning. 

Larkcom 

Don't say anything about it to any of the others. 
(The Strangie:r signifies understanding,) "Harry Lark- 
com — artist!" 



Christ's expectation of men 9 

The Stranger 
{Smiling,) And philanthropist. 

Larkcom 
And philanthropist. (Laughs.) Good night, in case 
I don't see you again — (holds out his hand) — partner. 

The Stranger 

Good night, partner. 

As a result of this conversation Harry Larkcom be- 
comes a professional entertainer with "Fun without 
Vulgarity" for his motto. 

Again The Stranger has a talk with a rich, broken- 
down, smutty, shady old book-maker, who is trying to 
get a beautiful girl who loathes his very touch to marry 
him as a means of supporting her indigent and quarrel- 
some parents. The Stranger had met the girFs 
eyes as she was starting out for a walk with the old 
gambler ; and as a result of The Stranger's look she 
had decided not to go with him. The conversation 
between Wright, the old gambler, and The Stranger, 
starts with the former's remonstrance against this silent 

interference. 

Wright 

I want to ask you a question. (He looks around, 

draws The Stranger further aside.) "Heat of the 



lO THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

room" be damned. It was the moment she caught 
sight of you that she changed — suddenly discovered 
that she wasn't feeling well — {with a sneering laugh). 
What's the understanding between you two? 

The Stranger 
You think it was I who influenced her? 

Wright 

I don't think anything about it. I was watching. 
Her eyes were fixed on yours all the time. 

The Stranger 

May it not have been merely her Better Self pleading 

to her? 

Wright 

Her Better Self! What better can she do for herself 
than marry me? I'm rich. Ain't I going to be kind 
to her? Ain't I going to settle money on her — money 
on herself, to spend as she likes? {With increasing 
vehemence.) Ain't I good enough for her? 

The Stranger 
And she ? Would she have been good enough for you ? 

Wright 
(Puzzled.) She ! Good enough for me ! 



Christ's expectation of men ii 

The Stranger 
Taking all your gifts — your love. Giving you noth- 
ing in return but the cold embraces of a shameless 
woman. 

(A silence,) 

Wright 

You don't understand. The world ain't a story-book 

— all Jacks and Jills and love in a cottage. The girl's 

got to Kve. 

The Stranger 

Ay ! To live ! It is a fine thing to live ! (He turns 

again smiling to little Old Joey.) You shall give her Life ! 

Wright 
(Staring.) Give her Life ? 

The Stranger 
The lad she loves. (Old Joey darts a glance at Chris- 
topher, where he sits all unconscious) She shall cleave 
to him, cherish him. She shall be the mother of children 

— children who shall crown her brows with honour! 

Love ! Labour ! That is Life to a woman. You shall 

give her Life ! 

(Again a silence) 

Wright 

(Peevishly) All jolly fine. What about me ? Where 

do I come in ? 



12 the gospel of good will 

The Stranger 
Man, you love her? 

Wright 
Yes, I know I do. 

The Stranger 
Then it is all quite simple. There is nothing else to 
think of but what is best — for her. 

Wright 
Yes, there is. There's me. Ain't I got any rights? 

The Stranger 
Ah, yes. The right to serve. 

Wright 
Here, you're making a mistake. You're talking to 
me as if I were some high and mighty Knight Errant 
sort of a chap. It's silly of you. I ain't even a gentle- 
man. I'm only a common little old man. Why, I was 
a book-maker — that's all I was. You know, a betting 
man — a bit shady at that. Daresay it's all right 
what you say. Only {he taps his breast; his voice has 
risen to a plaintive whine; Self -pity has given to it pathos) 
— I ain't got it in me. 

The Stranger 
Are you sure it is I who am making the mistake? 



Christ's expectation of men 13 

Wright 

{He makes a gesture of the hands, and, shaking his head, 
creeps to the easy-chair. Sits crouching with his hands 
stretched out to the fire) 

The Stranger 
You are so sure, {smiling) ^^Sir Joseph!" 

Wright 

{He turns) How did you know that used to be my 
nickname ? 

The Stranger 

You were a pubKc character. Wherever you went, 
men spoke of you — of your fine lordly ways, of your 
wondrous kindness. Women also. 

Wright 

Flinging your money about a bit when you've got 

plenty of it, that ain't the same as giving up the woman 

you love. 

The Stranger 

Forgetting Self — forgetting all things but the loving 
of her, and the serving of her ! Ah yes, he would be a 
great gentleman who could do that. You — you do not 
feel yourself quite equal to it? 



14 the gospel of good will 

Wright 
{He turns a poor, troubled face towards The Stranger.) 
Why mightn't she come to love me — in time? I 
would be good to her — and kind — and — {The quiet 
eyes are fixed on him. The foolish words die away) 

The Stranger 

I think you could win her love more readily. So 
that she would think of you till the end always with 
deep wonder — teach your name to her children that 
they, too, might learn to love and honour it. 

As the result of this conversation Wright gives up 
the girl, and helps on her marriage with his young rival. 

The third and last of these transforming interviews 
that I will cite is with Jape Samuels, a tricky Jew who 
is trying to sell the stock of a non-existent silver mine. 

Samuels 
Don't want to make your fortune, do you? 

The Stranger 
Do not all men? 

Samuels 

Got thomething here thath going to make mine. I'm 
going to be a millionnaire. Got a thilver mine here — 
{he strikes the papers with his hands) — worth — I'm 



Christ's expectation of men 15 

that exthited about it, I go about telling everybody I 
meet. (Laughs,) Of courth they don't believe me. 

The Stranger 
Why should they not ? 

• Samuels 
Well, it ain't thenth, ith it ? If a fellow hath got hold 
of a good thing, he keepth it to himthelf — doethn't 
want to let a lot of other people into it. 

The Stranger 
It depends upon the '^ fellow." There are generous 
fellows who like to share their fortune with their friends. 

Samuels 
(He looks at The Stranger; grows bolder,) Jutht 
exthactly what I thay. Why not share with your 
palth? Ethpethally when — ath in thith oath — 
thereth enough for all. (All the time he is eying The 
Stranger, advancing from point to point,) Would you 
like a thmall parthel? (He opens his papers, pushes 
them across the table, towards The Stranger.) You^d 
do good with the money. I can thee that. For a mere 
couple of hundred — Here, don't lithen to me. Look 
at the figurth for yourthelf. They'll thow you. (He 
seats himself the other side of the table.) 



1 6 the gospel of good will 

The Stranger 
(With a gentle movement he pushes them back across the 
table,) You are — is it not so ? — a Jew ? 

Samuels 
(He starts back as though struck. With snarling anger.) 
Veil, what if I am? You can't help what you wath 
born. Ath a matter of fact, I ain't a Jew — not now. 
And if I wath, what diflferenth would that make? 

The Stranger 

Your word would be sufl&cient. 

(Samuels stares,) 

The Stranger 
The word of a Jew. 

(A silence,) 

Samuels 

What makth you thay that? 

The Stranger 

So many of the noblest men I have known, men I 

have loved, (a faraway thought is in his eyes) have been 

Jews. It is a great race — a race rich in honourable 

names. 

Samuels 

(He is hard at work thinking,) Yet to hear the way 

they talk and thneer, you'd think there wath thome- 

thing dithgrathful in even having been born a Jew. 



christ's expectation of men 1 7 

The Stranger 
The Jew shall teach them their mistake. 

Samuels 
{He glances up- — fidgets in his chair) Of courthe, I 
don't thay that thome among uth mayn't be a bit tricky. 

The Stranger 
There are to be found everywhere those who are not 
ashamed to bring dishonour on their people. 

Samuels 
{He rises) Jutht exthactly what I thay. Thereth 
good and bad everywhere. We're no worthe than 
anybody elthe. We can hold our own — I don't thay 
ath we can't. If it'th a game of who'th going to betht 
whom — very well, we're in it. If a thentleman cometh 
to uth, treath uth ath a thentleman — 

The Stranger 
He will find that the Jew can also be a gentleman. 
{A moment — he touches lightly the papers) You were 
going to be so kind — 

Samuels 
{He stares at The Stranger, then at his wonderful 
papers, then again at The Stranger.) Yeth, I did — 
What do you think about it — yourthelf ? 



l8 the gospel of good will 

The Stranger 

That your offer is most generous — that I accept it, 

with all thanks. 

Samuels 

{He is still staring at The Stranger.) Don't you 

think — you'll forgive my thaying it, but you don't 

thrike me exthactly ath a bu thine th man — don't you 

think it would be better to leave it over for a day or 

two ? — conthult a friend ? 

The Stranger 
What friend better than yourself ? 

Samuels 

(Slowly he draws back the papers.) Got mythelf 
to think of. Wath forgetting that. You thee, if you 
wath to take my word and anything by any chanthe 
wath to go wrong, I thould feel — (Laughs, then gravely) 
well, I thould feel ath though I'd been thelling the 
whole Jewith rathe for a couple of hundred poundth or 
tho. 'Tain't worth it. (He moves toward the door — 
turns,) Thorry. Thomething elthe, perhapth — thome 
other time. 

In these conversations we see souls in the very process 
of salvation : putting off the vulgarity and vanity and 
trickery they had mistaken for themselves, and putting 



Christ's expectation or men 19 

on their better selves, which The Stranger discovers 
and reveals to them. As Mr. Samuels says to The 
Stranger in the Epilogue, '^You have always taken it 
for granted, sir, in all our conversations, that 1 was a 
fine fellow, in sympathy with fine ideals. But that is 
not what surprises me : it is to find — that you are 
right." In the same way Wright, the old gambler, 
finds his real self in ordering portraits of both himself 
and his landlady, at much more than the artist's price, 
of the artist lover of the young woman whom he him- 
self gives up : thus helping the lovers to get married. 
That, not the smutty, flashy gambler, proves to be the 
real man. 

So Larkcom with his new motto, "Fun without Vul- 
garity," taking pleasure in giving pleasure irrespective 
of what is in the house, proves to be the true Harry 
Larkcom : instead of little Harry of the money-box. 

The method of The Stranger in the play was a 
favorite method of Jesus. In the unstable Peter he 
discovers and proclaims the rock on which to build his 
church. In Zacchaeus, the hated publican, he discovers 
and reveals the scrupulously just son of Abraham. In 
the surprised woman of Samaria he discovers and re- 
veals a herald of the Messiah, a disciple of the religion 
of the Spirit. 



20 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

This is the method to-day of those who are dealing at 
close quarters with sin and sinners. 

In his *^ Beside the Bowery" Dr. John Hopkins Deni- 
son gives a striking instance of it in Mrs. Eliza Rock- 
well, ^^The Lady of Good Cheer," as he calls her. She 
had come to call on the long-suffering, much-abused 
daughters of a brutal, drunken father; who not only 
abused them himself but in his crazed drunken condi- 
tion had threatened to bring home a crowd of his drunken 
companions to carouse all night, leaving the girls at 
the mercy of a roomful of intoxicated men. 

The Lady of Good Cheer had brought some food for 
the girls, including a birthday cake in honour of the 
birthday of one of the girls. 

'^They were in the midst of a jolly little birthday 
party, when they heard a heavy stumbling step on the 
stair. '^He's coming!" cried the girls. For the Lady 
of Good Cheer the situation was a dangerous one. No 
one had come to her aid. To face alone a man who was 
so mad with drink that he had tried to kill his own 
children is hardly a pleasant task, and this man was a 
desperate character, who in his present mood would 
not hesitate a moment to strike a woman or knock her 
down. Yet retreat never entered her mind. If her 
heart beat more rapidly as she waited to see what sort 



Christ's expectation of men 21 

of a creature it was with which she had to deal, no one 
could have detected it. 

In a moment the door was thrown violently open, 
and a huge man entered with the lurching, swinging 
stride of a sailor. He had been fighting, his coat was 
torn, a heavy blow on the cheek bone had caused a 
swelling that made his eyes seem narrower and more 
pigHke than ever, and his drooping, sandy moustache 
had a stain of blood upon it. He was from the North 
of Ireland, and his origin was evident in his speech, 
thickened though it was by drink. 

^^Gi' me s' money, Jessie," he shouted, ^'gotter have 
s' money!" 

^^I haven't got none," said Jessie sullenly. 

"Yes, ye have, too! don't give me no back talk! I 
know yer tricks!" and he advanced upon her with 
doubled fist. 

The Lady of Good Cheer rose and stepped forward 
with a swift movement that brought her between the 
enraged man and his daughter. 

"Good evening, Mr. Sanderson," she said. 

He had been so absorbed in his quest for the money 
that he had paid no attention to her. Now he turned 
upon her with surprise and wrath. The veins on his 
forehead thickened. With that sullen scowl on his 



22 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

face he was as ugly a beast as ever assumed a human 
shape, and many a strong man would have thought 
twice before pursuing the conversation. 

''What're ye doin' here?" he shouted. ''Teachin' 
my girls to disobey their father. I'll teach you to 
butt in." 

He gave a quick lurch toward her. His movements 
had the uncertain and violent suddenness of a man mad- 
dened by alcohol. In another moment he would have 
struck her down, as he had just knocked down two men 
who barred his way in the saloon. She faced him, tall 
and slender, with head erect. Her aquiline nostrils 
quivered a little, and her firm lips tightened slightly, 
but from beneath her high brow her deep, steady eyes, 
unflinching and calm, looked him full in the face. 

^*Mr. Sanderson," she said quietly, ^^I know you are 
a gentleman, and that you would never do anything dis- 
courteous to a lady." 

With those eyes upon him, the drunken brute faltered. 
His hands sunk to his side. A foolish smile, half of 
embarrassment, half of conceit, came over his face. 
^^A gentleman? Yes, sure I'm a gentleman!" he said. 
He gave his shoulders a sudden hunch, as if his coat were 
too tight for them, and expanded his chest in imitation 
of the person of quality he was supposed to resemble. 



CHRIST'S EXPECTATION OF MEN 23 

Then he let out a cracked and maudlin laugh, that 
sounded like the crow of a hoarse rooster. 

The girls looked on, amazed that he had not struck 
down their visitor. He could hardly account for it 
himself. When he rushed at any one with his huge 
fist poised, he was accustomed to see either fear or rage 
in his victim's eyes, and then it was easy ^ to strike. But 
in these eyes there was no trace of fear nor rage, nor yet 
that more maddening expression of disgust and contempt. 
They were challenging him on a point of honour, as if 
they refused to accept him at his face value. They 
seemed to question and probe, but not to laugh at him. 
There was almost a reverence in them. He felt that 
she had found in him something that deserved respect, 
and it pleased him. He paid little attention to her 
words, but the sympathy in her voice arrested him. 
She was not fault-finding, as other women were. Vague 
images out of the past rose before his bleared eyes: 
the image of a white-haired woman by the fireside, 
whose hands were stretched out to bless him, the vision 
of a fair-faced bride who long ago had trusted him and 
believed him true. The Lady of Good Cheer talked 
on of his home, and of little Nellie, and of her disappoint- 
ment that her birthday had been forgotten. 

^Toor little Nellie!" said Sanderson, maudlin tears 



24 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

coming into his eyes. "Shure, 'tis a shame ! It's a bad 
day she's had for sure ! Never mind, dearie, your dad'U 
give you a fine present some day ! But I'm too poor 
now. I'm out o' work. What can a man do ? Dear ! 
Dear ! it's terrible !" and he gave a long sigh. 

"You see we have a birthday cake, anyway," said 
the Lady of Good Cheer. "Isn't that nice? Sit down 
and join the party." 

"No," said Sanderson, "I must go." A sudden 
fierceness came into his face, and he turned to Jessie. 
"Now give me that money! I've got to have it! I 
won't stand no foolin' !" 

He lifted his huge fist again. For the moment he was 
out of the range of the glance by which the Lady of 
Good Cheer had held him. 

"Mr. Sanderson!" she called. 

Her voice, though quiet, was so firm and authorita- 
tive that Sanderson turned, expecting a tirade and pre- 
paring to face it with a burst of rage. But instead of 
a scolding he met a glance of grateful confidence that 
seemed to thank him for his quick understanding and 
prompt response. She seemed so sure that no further 
word could be necessary, that he gave a gasp of aston- 
ishment. Before he could speak she was inquiring in a 
tone of great sympathy how he had come to lose his 



Christ's expectation of men 25 

position as pressman, and to meet with such hard luck. 
There is nothing a drunken man loves more than to 
dilate on his misfortunes, and Sanderson, willing to be 
beguiled, sank down on the sofa. 

He sprawled with his huge length over the sofa, and 
she began to speak seriously and sympathetically of the 
Hfe he had been living. She told him plainly what 
she thought of his behaviour, and he sat quietly and 
listened, although he would have knocked a man down 
for saying half as much. For he felt that, though she 
rebuked him, it was because she had found something 
in him she respected and trusted, and he recognized 
that she had a right to speak as she did. It was the 
same right which he had acknowledged in those who 
years ago had believed in him — the claim which faith 
and love always have over a man's hfe. The battle 
was won long before help came, and the girls were safe 
that night from terrors worse than death. On her way 
uptown the Lady of Good Cheer ended her account of 
the evening by saying: ^^I don't care what you say! 
I Kke Mr. Sanderson. There's something that's really 
worth while at the bottom of that man." 

Rev. Frank H. Decker of Church House, Providence, 
is past master of the same method of the Master. He 



26 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

had sent a new applicant for hospitality out with a 
trusty resident of Church House to bring a bundle of 
clothing which a friend had offered to give to the House. 
On the way back with the clothing the new man said 
to his trusty companion, '^ Let's pawn these clothes, 
and clear out.'' The trusty reported the remark to 
Mr. Decker, and Mr. Decker sent for him and said: 
"I hear that you proposed to pawn the clothing you 
were sent to bring, and clear out." "No," said the 
man, "I didn't say, ^ Let's pawn them.' I said 'Some 
fellows if they had these clothes would pawn them.' " 
To which Mr. Decker, intent on finding the best rather 
than the worst in the man, replied, "There is something 
splendid about that lie of yours. It shows that you 
care for my good opinion. Now I will show you how to 
get it." How many of us would have had enough of 
the Christ Spirit to see the good concealed behind the 
lie ; instead of merely the evil on the surface of the pro- 
posal to steal? 

Another applicant for Church House hospitality was 
sent to carry home some chairs that had been reseated 
at the House. At the end of the first block he put down 
the chairs on the sidewalk and said to the trusty com- 
panion, "I ain't going to lug these chairs. Why should 
I?" and went off. Later at meal- time he reappeared. 



Christ's expectation of men 27 

Mr. Decker in calling his attention to the affair, instead 
of blaming the man apologized to him for his own con- 
duct, saying, ^^I began too far along with you. I as- 
sumed that you could appreciate kindness. I see you 
can't. Perhaps people never have been kind to you. 
Now make yourself at home here in Church House, and 
let us show you what kindness is." 

That man became one of the most devoted members of 
the House; willing to do the roughest, most disagree- 
able work, of which there is a great deal, to help the 
House and its head. 

With these scenes from the play, and these modern 
instances of the application of this Christ method of 
appealing to the good man within the bad man, we 
may now see how the principle applies to preaching. 

Preaching is the art of keeping constant and urgent 
before men Christ's expectation that in every relation 
of life they are to do and be what absolute Good Will 
requires. As examples of this Christian expectation I 
have taken for this first lecture benevolence, tem- 
perance, and preparedness for peace and war. 

First; benevolence. The man who looks out for 
himself and his family and friends exclusively, so far 
as real seriousness goes, giving to causes and appeals 
such loose change or small checks as will silence impor- 



28 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

tunity and maintain respectabiKty, can hardly be called 
in this matter a Christian. He is doing what it is per- 
fectly easy and natural to do. There is nothing large 
and generous about him ; nothing supernatural ; nothing 
specially Christlike. Even if now and then in response 
to stirring appeals, or devices that subject his contribu- 
tions to the limelight of publicity, he gives large sums ; 
large even in proportion to his income; he does not 
thereby become much enlarged ; he does not rise to the 
stature or fulfil the expectation of Christ. 

Christ and the Christian preacher expect every 
disciple to devote all he has to the service of Good Will. 
He expects him to put every dollar where, all things 
considered, in view of his talents, responsibilities, con- 
nections, and place and function in the social system, 
it will do the most good. He expects him to give all to 
God and his fellows; reserving for himself only what 
God and right-minded men see that he needs for maxi- 
mum efficiency in his specific station. Christ expects 
his disciple to care for every person in need ; every cause 
that is effectively promoting human welfare. To those 
which come closest to his connections and interests he 
expects him to give up to the point where giving more 
would do more harm to himself and his family than it 
would do good to the person or cause to which it was given. 



Christ's expectation of men 29 

Christ, however, is reasonable : and the Christian 
preacher ordinarily will not expect his people to deprive 
themselves of the means of efl&ciency in their station 
and work, to give to others. That would be the folly 
of selling our oil instead of lighting our lamps. We owe 
ourselves and our families a care for the conditions of 
health, happiness, and efl&ciency which we owe no one 
else; and we ought to be as generous with ourselves 
and our families as we would wish and expect another 
to be in our place. That reasonable provision the rea- 
sonable Christ not only allows but expects his disciples 
in all ordinary circumstances to make. To do so is not 
selfishness : it is perfectly consistent with entire Good 
Will ; for it is what we would wish and advise another 
servant of Good Will to do were he in our place. 

Yet even with this explanation and limitation Christ's 
expectation is stupendous. Even if Good Will gives 
back to us all that we need ; it is a hard thing to give 
it all in the first place. To give to the church, and 
charity and reform, and education and missions; to 
individuals and families in distress ; to cities in devasta- 
tion, and countries under oppression, seems impossible 
to the natural man. He says ^'I can't look out for all 
their interests. I can't hold aU human and social needs 
as objects of my will; I am not big enough, nor wise 



30 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

enough, nor generous enough. Christ says, "You can; 
you are big enough : I will stretch your will, expand 
your heart, so that every good claim will appeal to you 
as something to which you will go out in generous re- 
sponse : giving gladly when you can do so without sacri- 
ficing a more intimate and urgent claim: withholding 
regretfully when giving in this direction would cause 
more disastrous sacrifice elsewhere." 

Christ expects that universal and at the same time 
reasonable benevolence of every disciple. That is his 
measure of the capacity of every human heart: he 
will not own as his disciple any man who is less benevo- 
lent. There are two premises in the benevolent appeal 
as in every syllogism : a major and a minor. The major 
premise of the Christian man is, "I desire all good : my 
entire resources are at the service of universal Good 
Will." The minor premise of a successful appeal must 
be, "This particular cause represents more good than 
any other cause to which I could devote this gift." 
The Christian man, the man who comes up to Christ's 
expectation, has assented to the major premise once for 
all. You don't have to argue that with him in each 
new case. The minor premise is always an open ques- 
tion on which in each case he must be specifically con- 
vinced. The man who is not a Christian, the man whom 



Christ's expectation of men 31 

Christ has not expanded and transformed, lacks the first 
premise ; so that even if you convince him of the second, 
you are not by any means sure that his gift will follow. 
It is a question of chance, emotion, publicity, vanity, 
whether he will say ^Yes' or ^No.' With the Christian 
you have merely to establish the minor premise; and 
the gift is sure to follow if the man is a real follower 
of Christ. All you have to do is to show him where the 
most good lies : to the most good in general he is already 
committed by his acceptance of Good Will as his prin- 
ciple of action in response to Christ's high expectation. 

In the name of Christ then the preacher says to his 
congregation from the pulpit, and to individuals in 
personal appeals: ^'You are big and generous enough 
to devote all you have to the greatest good to which it 
can be put. I count on you for that : you wouldn't be 
Christians if you were any smaller or less generous. 
I present this specific cause : I can't judge for you how 
it compares with other claims; how much you ought 
to give. I trust you to do that justly; and whether 
you give much or little, anything or nothing, I shall 
feel sure that Christ is well pleased with you, and you 
are well pleased with what you have done. 

The preacher who comes to his congregation with 
this great Christhke expectation will get more money 



32 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

than one who flatters, and wheedles, and brings pressure 
of unwelcome publicity, or resorts to secular devices: 
and he will be developing benevolence as one specific 
feature of the Gospel of Good Will. 

Temperance may be preached on either of three planes. 
By temperance I mean self-control of all appetites and 
passions. You may try to scare men into it by showing 
pictures of the drunkard's stomach ; and giving detailed 
descriptions of venereal disease. That is the appeal to 
prudence ; to caution ; I had almost said, to cowardice. 
The man who is temperate on such grounds will be a 
more comfortable man physically than the man who 
recklessly gratifies his appetites and passions. But 
spiritually he is not much bigger than the man of in- 
temperate indulgence. Indeed from some points of 
view he looks smaller ; and the contempt in which the 
ascetic is held by the crowd of jolly good fellows with 
whom he refuses to run to the same excess of riot is not 
without its measure of justification. From the merely 
physical point of view appetite and passion in process 
of gratification is a bigger, stronger thing than appetite 
and passion repressed. All who have to do with young 
men know that this anchor alone does not hold. We 
throw it out with the rest for what it is worth. We doubt- 
less restrain a few weaklings by it. But this is not the 



Christ's expectation of men 33 

main reliance of a wise teacher and preacher. It is not 
the method of Christ. 

A second approach is little better. We may point 
to the disgrace which follows unlawful indulgence. We 
may appeal to a man's desire to be respectable in the 
eyes of respectable men and women. This is the mod- 
ern equivalent of what St. Paul called ^^the law"; the 
judgment of society. Yet a man may restrain appetite 
and passion for these reasons, and still be a very small 
soul. He too is a coward ; afraid of the speech of people 
rather than of the penalties of nature. 

Jesus never condescended to that plane : and though 
we cast out this anchor after the other, for real holding 
power, if we are wise, we rely on something far stronger 
and higher. We appeal to a bigger and better man 
than the man who always asks, ^^What will people say 
about me and do to me, if I am as indulgent in these 
matters as I would be if I dared ? " Whether in ourselves 
or in others we don't much respect that attitude ; and 
we can't hope to inspire much respect for it in our 
parishioners. 

The Christian call for temperance is an appeal to 
consider the consequences of drunkenness and licentious- 
ness to the wives and daughters of the poor. We do 
not wish the home life of the drunkard's wife and chil- 



34 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

dren, for women and children dear to us. But we are 
large enough to care for the home Hfe of all men, women, 
and children ; and Christian temperance is such control 
as through influence and example shall tend to dis- 
courage the blasting of homes by drink; and make 
happy and decent homes for all. To that bigger, better 
self that wills the good of all whom our conduct even 
remotely affects, the preacher of Christian temperance 
will appeal. 

The same is true of sex. I often ask a College class 
how many of them would wish for their mothers and 
sisters the life of the prostitute? The very thought of 
such a thing is horrible. How many wish it for the 
sisters and daughters of somebody else? The man 
who wishes something for his mother, sister, wife, daugh- 
ter, which he does not, to the extent of his direct and 
indirect influence, wish for other men's mothers, sisters, 
wives, and daughters is not a very large and noble sort 
of man. "You are not so small and mean as that," the 
preacher says. "You are chivalrous enough by prac- 
tice, precept and example to seek for all women their 
dignity, their happiness, their Hfe; even though these 
women are too unfortunate, or too silly, or too perverse 
to cherish these things for themselves. Expect chivalry 
of men : expect a Good Will as generous and chivalrous 



Christ's expectation of men 35 

toward woman as is the Will of Christ; and men like 
Wright and Harry Larkcom in the play, men strongly 
tempted to licentiousness, will respond to the call to 
be in this respect their better selves. 

For self-control on that generous, chivalrous Chris- 
tian ground is something all men in their inmost hearts 
respect and admire. Prudential self-control, whether 
of the physical or social type, the libertine with some 
show of reason may affect to despise. But even he 
knows and feels that the man who refuses for his own 
passing pleasure to wreck homes, ruin girls, and doom 
to misery and shame a whole class of wretched women : 
— even the libertine knows that this man of chivalrous 
self-control is a bigger, stronger, braver, better man than 
himself. Invite even him to be that man of chivalrous 
self-control, and to his great surprise, perhaps, he will 
admit in theory that you are right : and if the contact 
between you and him is intimate enough and constant 
enough : if you can get and keep Christ and this Chris- 
tian chivalry in close enough touch with his heart, his 
changed conviction will bear fruit in a changed life. 
To keep that positive picture of Christ and Christian 
chivalry clear before the eyes, warm within the heart, 
and compelling behind the will, as what Christ and you 
expect of the men to whom you speak in public sermon 



36 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

and in private interview — that is the fine Christlike 
art of preaching Christian temperance. 

Here in the United States we have more of such tem- 
perance than is to be found anywhere else in the world : 
so much that when we tell foreigners the truth about 
the Christian young people in our schools and colleges, 
our Endeavor Societies and Christian Associations, they 
hardly can believe us. They have not yet learned to 
trust the Christian expectation which takes for granted 
chivalry in men and chastity in women when once its 
rational and noble basis is made clear. Still even here 
in America we have hardly developed more than one or 
two per cent of the power latent in this Christian appeal 
for a temperance that is rooted and grounded in the great- 
ness and nobleness of a Will that seeks the Good of all ; 
the injury of none. 

Good Will, likewise, rather than the letter of any 
ancient precept, must solve in each specific case the 
question of peace or war. Christ does not expect of 
his followers either peace or war, as such. He ex- 
pects Good Will toward all. When that Good Will 
comes to be the spirit of all men and nations, peace 
will follow as surely as daylight follows sunrise. It 
is the Christian's privilege and duty to have that Good 
Will toward all, to develop it in others, and to the extent 



CHRIST S EXPECTATION OF MEN 37 

of his influence make it the policy of his nation, and 
through his nation to commend it in the form of in- 
ternational agreements, treaties, and courts of arbitra- 
tion to all the nations of the earth. 

Unfortunately, this Good Will is still far from being 
the rule of all individuals and of nations. As long as 
some individuals and some nations are animated by 
self-will, and are capable of lapsing into positive ill will, 
so long it may become at any time the duty of Chris- 
tian men and Christian nations, as an expression of their 
Good Will toward all, to resist by force the aggressions 
of selfish men and selfish nations. Such resistance is 
not a violation, but an expression of Good Will. It is 
not good for the oppressed to be oppressed, nor for the 
oppressor to oppress them; and the Christian man 
and the Christian nation is doing a service to both 
parties when he uses force to resist any injustice to him- 
self, or to his nation, or to nations with which he is 
identified by proximity, treaty, or other bonds of obliga- 
tion. If it is the duty of a Christian nation to use force, 
it becomes also its duty to have a reasonable amount of 
force to use. A Christian country cannot live up to its 
obligations to itself, to other nations with which it is allied, 
and to humanity, unless it maintains a sufl&cient military 
force to enable it to resist aggression and injustice. 



38 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

Of course the possession of a ready military power is 
a temptation to its misuse. The fact that a country 
adopts a policy of preparedness to fight increases ten- 
fold the obligation to maintain a Christian sentiment 
which will refuse to fight so long as the ends of honor 
and justice can be secured by other means. The danger 
of militarism from preparedness is real. Power of all 
kinds involves serious risk. It is easier to be generous 
without great wealth than with it; yet the generous 
rich man can do much more good than the generous poor 
man. It is easier for an emasculated man than for a 
man of vigorous virility to control appetite and passion ; 
but no one in these days advocates that easy but dis- 
credited device for self-control. Precisely on the same 
ground, while Good Will may be easier without than 
with an army and navy, Good Will that maintains an 
army and navy, uses them strictly in the service of 
justice, and refrains from the injustice they give power 
to do, is a far greater manifestation of Good Will, and 
therefore a deeper and higher Christianity. 

That such Good Will is not an empty dream of the 
cloister, but a growing reality in the minds and hearts of 
Christian men the world over, is illustrated by the fol- 
lowing statement of Dr. Friedrich Wilhelm Forster, 
Professor of Education in Munich. I quote a German 



Christ's expectation or men 39 

all the more willingly in this connection because so many 
sentiments of a contrary tenor have come from that 
country. In an address to the youth of Germany on 
the present war, Dr. Forster says : 

^^ Hate disorganizes, love disciplines. Fill yourselves 
with deepest sympathy for all who suffer in war, whose 
hearts are crushed, whose bodies are broken, whose 
homes are burned. To indulge unbridled antipathies 
is not in harmony with that great discipline of soul by 
which alone we can win the day. England needs Ger- 
many, and Germany needs England. England has 
given us invaluable higher points of view for the treat- 
ment of labor questions and social work. She has taught 
our revolutionary spirits to moderate our party passions. 
Let us always remember this, and in that remembrance 
grasp again for the future the proffered hand. It is for 
that better England we are fighting when we do all we 
can to humble and tame thoroughly and for its own good 
that lower England that is now in power. The national 
principle has had a disastrous destructive effect on 
world civilization. A nation destroys itself, annihilates 
the whole sum of ci\dlization, if these national unities do 
not see that a wider phase must follow — the reestablish- 
ment of true cooperation between the different races. In 
the union of races will the universal Christ be born in us.'' 



40 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

An Englishman, John Oman, in his ^'The War and 
its Issues" teaches the same lesson. "We can have no 
part in any gospel of hate, as if at the present time the 
Germans were mere fiends in human shape. We may 
have to recognise that they have adopted a cause for 
which they must suffer, but we should do so in sorrow, 
as a judge who must condemn, yet who would be np 
judge did he condemn with a light heart or in the heat 
of passion. Even more than towards others, we must 
exercise the judgment of charity towards the enemy, 
recognising that we are sure to hear of the evil and not 
the good, and allowing for the possible bias of our own 
hearts. And while we know it is vain to say " Peace " 
when there is no peace, or set up any other standard 
of peace except what will endure, we would not have a 
war pursued beyond that necessary point, and would 
have no share in inflicting a ruin which was merely 
vindictive. We will not imagine that much conquest 
and little conciliation can destroy Germany and save 
Britain. We should recognise that a peace to be abid- 
ing must be established in righteousness and a sense of 
mutual benefit and Good Will." 

The same basis alike of just peace and righteous war 
is set forth by Felix Adler in his "The World Crisis 
and its Meaning." "We have dwelt too long upon the 



CHRIST'S EXPECTATION OF MEN 4I 

cosmopolitan ideal of the likeness subsisting underneath 
the differences that distinguish men from one another. 
We must insist as we never yet have done on respect 
for the differences themselves, on the right of men and 
nations to be unlike ourselves, on our obligation not 
only to tolerate but to welcome the differences, recog- 
nizing their fruitful interdependence and seeking to 
achieve their eventual harmony. This is the new con- 
ception of human brotherhood without which war and 
the preparations for war will not cease. There must be 
created throughout the world, not the belief in an indi- 
vidualistic cosmopolitan brotherhood such as the peace 
movement has hitherto advocated, but a deep sense of 
the worth of the different types of civilization, and the 
need of each to be complemented by the rest. 

"Thus national humility, compatible with proper 
confidence in a national destiny, is the keynote of inter- 
national ethics. Not the pride of any people, in its 
poor conceit esteeming itself the torch-bearer or the 
model for all the rest ; but the humility of each people, 
the consciousness of defect, is the fundamental condi- 
tion of human peace and progress. In the last analysis 
there must be a bond of high and pure self-interest to 
tie the nations together. That highest and purest 
self-interest is interest in the development of each 



42 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

nation's own national personality, as conditioned by 
and accomplished through its beneficent influence in 
multiplying the variety and beauty of the psychic types 
among mankind. By patient effort, by a more pene- 
trating ethical teaching, and by the wit and wisdom 
to create institutions and instrumentalities suitable to 
foster the better traits, we may work for, if we shall not 
live to see, the time when the angelic song shall be ful- 
filled, of peace among men because they shall have 
learned to take towards one another the essential inward 
attitude of Goodwill." 

Christ's expectation is neither war on any provoca- 
tion, nor peace at any price ; but Good Will, expressed 
through peace where peace is justly possible ; expressed 
through war where war is inevitable. Rightly and 
broadly understood Christ does not forbid participation 
in war, or preparedness for war. To quote again John 
Oman on this point: ^'So long as religion means a 
greater sense of social responsibility, no man can be 
governed by a mere negative ruling from any quarter." 

The preacher's duty about preparedness for and 
participation in war is not to tell his people precisely 
how many officers and men, battleships and sub- 
marines, we shall have; nor even when war shall and 
shall not be declared. It is to make sure that the spirit 



Christ's expectation of men 43 

in which we prepare for and declare both war and peace 
shall be one of Good Will toward all the nations con- 
cerned. 

Good Will requires such measure of preparedness 
as will defend us against aggression, fulfil our obliga- 
tions to our neighbors, maintain our rights in treaties, 
and contribute to the justice and peace of the world 
an influence commensurate with our numbers, our 
wealth, and our intelligence. Less is folly; more is 
crime. That the preacher of the Gospel of Good Will 
should proclaim; leaving to statesmen the determina- 
tion of precisely what is that measure of preparedness. 
The Christian attitude toward war is happily expressed 
in the epitaph proposed for Rupert Brooke and Roland 
Poulter : " They went to war in the cause of peace and 
died without hate that love might live." 

Perhaps some one will ask "What rewards are given, 
here or hereafter, for responding to so high an expecta- 
tion, and living so great a life?" It is its own reward : 
and to look for extraneous recompense is to miss it 
altogether. Unless Christ, and the Christlike Spirit 
in our fellow-men, appeal to us as the life we supremely 
admire and desire, we can have no part or lot in it. 
Christ and his Good Will refuse to take second place 
as means to happiness here or heaven hereafter. Who- 



44 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

ever attempts to put rewards first and Christ and 
his expectation second, whether for himself in practice, 
or for others in preaching, belittles and belies the whole 
Gospel of Good Will; and so, missing the Christian 
life, as a matter of course misses the '^rewards" he is 
so eager to secure. He that loveth rewards more than 
Christ is not worthy of him ; and being unworthy of him 
is incapable of appropriating the blessings he confers, 
r Still, while it is impossible to get rewards by seeking 
to discount them as something separate from Christ 
and his Spirit of Good Will, certain benefits and bless- 
ings come with this life as by-products, which the 
preacher has a right to couple with his presentation of 
the Gospel of Good Will. 

Breadth of heart, as John Galsworthy calls it, is the 
first and greatest. He who rises to Christ's expecta- 
tion becomes thereby one in sympathy and affection 
with all whom his life touches, and all whom his sym- 
pathy and prayer can reach. He grows great with 
something of the greatness of the Father whose Good 
Will to all men and all nations he shares and serves. 

He becomes one with Christ in an intimate and blessed 
fellowship of aim and endeavor, service and sacrifice; 
so that he is never alone or companionless : but in what- 
ever he undertakes feels the supporting presence, the 



CHRIST S EXPECTATION OF MEN 4$ 

steadying purpose of the Great Master who comes across 
the seas and the centuries to take up his abode in the 
heart of every faithful follower. 

He enters into a profound and tender communion 
with a company of men and women, larger or smaller 
according to the scope and range of his life, who share 
his purpose, and whose purpose he shares ; so that each 
looks upon the other as an incarnation of Christ's Spirit 
of Good Will; and each is loved and cherished by the 
others on this high and holy plane. 

This communion and fellowship of the Spirit of mutual 
Good Will toward each other and toward all is so much 
deeper, sweeter, stronger, richer than ties of propinquity, 
passion, profit or pleasure, that those who have once 
found it recognize it as the pearl of great price for the 
sake of which all other goods like wealth, honor, leisure, 
amusement, so far as they may conflict with it, are 
eagerly given in exchange. 



II 

FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL: THE MEANNESS 

OF SIN 

"The devil takes sweet shapes when he tells lies." John 
Masefield, The Widow in the Bye Street y p. 218. 

Our text is taken from our most eflfective modern 
preacher of the exceeding sinfulness of sin, its meanness 
and cruelty and wantonness. If he dwells chiefly on 
sexual sin it is because there the apparent good offered 
is most alluring and intense ; while the resulting evil 
is most cruel and heartbreaking. 

This contemporary English poet, both in the rough 
experiences of his life, and the coarse frankness of his 
language, has shown himself to be like Jesus in at least 
one particular — his genuine friendship for publicans 
and sinners. Above most modern writers he has the 
art to turn sin inside out; and in place of the brave, 
gay pleasures for which it is sought, show the unspeak- 
able misery and woe it inevitably brings to those who 
have to pay its bitter penalty. As Dickens showed 

46 



FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 47 

Steerforth the seducer in the light of the grief of the 

Peggotty household, John Masefield shows sexual sin 

against the background of the betrayed woman's shame ; 

or the misled boy's broken-hearted mother. 

For a straight lesson to the libertine there is nothing 

better than Masefield's lines in "The Everlasting 

Mercy." 

O young men, pray to be kept whole 

From bringing down a weaker soul. 

Your minute's joy so meet in doin' 

May be the woman's door to ruin ; 

The door to wandering up and down, 

A painted whore at half a crown. 

The bright mind fouled, the beauty gay 

All eaten out and fallen away, 

By drunken days and weary tramps 

From pub to pub by city lamps 

Till men despise the game they started, 

Till health and beauty are departed, 

And in a slum the reeking hag 

Mumbles a crust with toothy jag, 

Or gets a river's help to end 

The life too wrecked for man to mend. 

A more elaborate and artistic treatment of the evil 
woman is found in "The Widow in the Bye Street." 
There the cruelty of leading an innocent boy astray 
is revealed in terms of the humble but happy home the 
wanton woman destroyed for the widowed mother. 



48 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

The story is about the fall of the boy through the wiles 
of the evil woman : but the title is "The Widow in the 
Bye Street" ; and the reader is made to see each move, 
not as the mere outward acts of the principal actors; 
but as it cuts into the flesh and eats into the heart of 
the poor widow-mother. That is where you must look 
to discover the real sinfulness of sin. Without this 
background of mother love and domestic joy, the folly 
of the boy, the sin of the woman, could not be seen as 
the cruel and utterly despicable things they are. 

The story opens with a picture of this poor widow 
in her home struggling to buy bread for the son who was 
all her Ufe's delight. 

Down Bye Street, in a little Shropshire town, 
There lived a widow with her only son : 
She had no wealth nor title to renown. 
Nor any joyous hours, never one. 
She rose from ragged mattress before sim 
And stitched all day until her eyes were red, 
And had to stitch because her man was dead. 

Sometimes she fell asleep, she stitched so hard. 

Letting the linen fall upon the floor ; 

And hungry cats would steal in from the yard, 

And mangy chickens pecked about the door, 

Craning their necks so ragged and so sore 

To search the room for bread crumbs, or for mouse, 

But they got nothing in the widow's house. 



FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 49 

Mostly she made her bread by hemming shrouds 
For one rich undertaker in the High Street, 
Who used to pray that folks might die in crowds 
And that their friends might pay to let them lie sweet ; 
And when one died the widow in the Bye Street 
Stitched night and day to give the worm his dole. 
The dead were better dressed than that poor soul. 

Her Httle son was all her life's delight, 
For in his little features she could find 
A glimpse of that dead husband out of sight, 
Where out of sight is never out of mind. 
And so she stitched till she was nearly blind, 
Or till the tallow candle end was done. 
To get a living for her little son. 

Her love for him being such she would not rest, 
It was a want which ate her out and in. 
Another hunger in her withered breast 
Pressing her woman's bones against the skin. 
To make him plump she starved her body thin. 
And he, he ate the food, and never knew. 
He laughed and played as little children do. 

When there was little sickness in the place 

She took what God would send, and what God sent 

Never brought any color to her face 

Nor life into her footsteps when she went. 

Going, she trembled always withered and bent. 

For all went to her son, always the same, 

He was first served whatever blessing came. 



so THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

Sometimes she wandered out to gather sticks, 
For it was bitter cold there when it snowed. 
And she stole hay out of the farmer's ricks 
For bands to wrap her feet in while she sewed, 
And when her feet were warm and the grate glowed 
She hugged her little son, her heart's desire. 
With "Jimmy, ain't it snug beside the fire?" 

So years went on till Jimmy was a lad 

And went to work as poor lads have to do. 

And then the widow's loving heart was glad 

To know that all the pains she had gone through, 

And all the years of putting on the screw, 

Down to the sharpest turn a mortal can, 

Had borne their fruit, and made her child a man. 

He got a job at working on the line. 
Tipping the earth down, trolley after truck, 
From daylight till the evening, wet or fine, 
With arms all red from wallowing in the muck, 
And spitting, as the trolley tipped, for luck. 
And singing "Binger" as he swung the pick, 
Because the red blood ran in him so quick. 

So there was bacon then at night, for supper 
In Bye Street there, where he and mother stay ; 
And boots they had, not leaky in the upper, 
And room rent ready on the setthng day ; 
And beer for poor old mother, worn and grey, 
And fire in frost ; and in the widow's eyes 
It seemed the Lord had made earth paradise. 



FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 51 

And there they sat of evenings after dark 
Singing their songs of "Binger," he and she, 
Her poor old cackle made the mongrels bark 
And "You sing Binger, mother," carols he; 
"By crimes, but that's a good song, that her be :'* 
And then they slept there in the room they shared, 
And all the time fate had his end prepared. 

That is the background. For the story thrown on 
that background I must refer you to the book itself. 
A loose woman, 

A copper coin for any man to spend 

meets the boy at a country fair, leads him astray 
through posing as virtuous and unhappy, and appealing 
to his pity and his passion. He spends his money on 
trinkets for her : 

Joy of her beauty ran in him so hot. 
Old trembhng mother by him was forgot. 

He loses his job ; is used as a tool to bring another lover 
back to his mistress : finally kills the other lover and is 
sentenced to be hung. All the sad tale is so told that 
the poor pleasures of the strumpet and the boy are seen 
and felt in terms of the heartache and anguish of the 
mother, ^'crying herself blind" ; sorry for her own want 
and misery, but more sorry for the poor boy's shame 



52 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

and delusion. She tells him what true love is ; and tries 
to show him that this is counterfeit. 

"I know a woman's portion when she loves, 
It's hers to give, my darling, not to take ; 
It isn't lockets, dear, nor pairs of gloves. 
It isn't marriage bells nor wedding cake, 
It's up and cook, although the belly ache ; 
And bear the child, and up and work again. 
And count a sick man's grumble worth the pain. 
Will she do this, and fifty times as much?" 

J. "No. I don't ask her." 

M. "No. I warrant, no. 
She's one to get a young fool in her clutch, 
And you're a fool to let her trap you so. 
She love you ? She ? O Jimmy, let her go ; 
I was so happy, dear, before she came, 
And now I'm going to the grave in shame. 
I bore you, Jimmy, in this very room. 
For fifteen years I got you all you had, 
You were my little son, made in my womb, 
Left all to me, for God had took your dad, 
You were a good son, doing all I bade. 
Until this strumpet came from God knows where, 
And now you lie, and I am in despair." 

Before his death the boy wakes up with disgust 

At finding a beloved woman light. 
And all her precious beauty dirty dust, 
A tinsel-varnished gilded over lust. 



FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 53 

When the mother comes and takes a room to be near 
him in prison he asks her, 

"Where did you get the money for the room? 
And how are you Hving, mother ; how'll you Hve ? " 
'^It's what I'd saved to put me in the tomb, 
I'll want no tomb but what the parish give.'* 
"Mother, I Hed to you that time, O forgive, 
I brought home half my wages, half I spent, 
And you went short that week to pay the rent. 

"I went to see'r, I spent my money on her, 
And you who bore me paid the cost in pain. 
You went without to buy the clothes upon her : 
A hat, a locket, and a silver chain. 
O mother dear, if all might be again, 
Only from last October, you and me ; 

mother dear, how different it would be. 

"We were so happy in the room together, 
Singing at ^Binger-Bopper,' weren't us, just? 
And going a-hopping in the summer weather, 
And all the hedges covered white with dust, 
And blackberries, and that, and traveller's trust. 

1 thought her wronged, and true, and sweet, and wise, 
The devil takes sweet shapes when he tells Ues. 

"Mother, my dear, will you forgive your son?" 
" God knows I do, Jim, I forgive you, dear ; 
You didn't know, and couldn't, what you done. 



54 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

God pity all poor people suffering here, 
And may his mercy shine upon us clear, 
And may we have His Holy Word for mark. 
To lead us to His Kingdom through the dark." 

Then at the end — the end save for the poor mother's 
going crazy after his execution — comes the mother's 
great soliloquy and prayer: one of the profoundest 
spiritual passages in contemporary literature. 

" Red helpless Httle things will come to birth, 

And hear the whistles going down the line, 

And grow up strong and go about the earth. 

And have much happier times than yours and mine ; 

And some day one of them will get a sign. 

And talk to folk, and put an end to sin, 

And then God's blessed kingdom will begin. 

" God dropped a spark down into everyone. 
And if we find and fan it to a blaze 
It'll spring up and glow, Hke — like the sun, 
And light the wandering out of stony ways. 
-^ God warms his hands at man's heart when he prays, 
And light of prayer is spreading heart to heart; 
It'll light all where now it hghts a part. 

" And God who gave His mercies takes His mercies. 
And God who gives beginning gives the end. 
I dread my death ; but it's the end of curses, 
A rest for broken things too broke to mend. 



FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 55 

/ O Captain Christ, our blessed Lord and Friend, 
I We are two wandered sinners in the mire. 
Burn our dead hearts with love out of Thy fire. 

" And when thy death comes. Master, let us bear it 
As of Thy will, however hard to go ; 
- — Thy cross is infinite for us to share it, 
Thy help is infinite for us to know ; 
And when the long trumpets of the Judgment blow 
May our poor souls be glad and meet agen. 
And rest in Thee. Say * Amen, ' Jim." "Amen. " 

From this widowed mother's prayer one rises with a 
solemn sense of the cruel cost of sin ; and pity for the 
poor innocent sufferer whose love compels her to pay 
for short-lived selfish pleasure in lifelong loving pain; 
bearing, as she says, her share of Christ's infinite cross. 

Not every preacher can be a literary artist; but we 
all can use the artist's work to show that pain of inno- 
cent and guilty alike is ever the ugly other side of 
the smooth and glossy surface of sin. To do that is to 
make men hate it, and lead them to repent. 
f With the passing of the arbitrary God, laying down 
\ rules and regulations for his own delectation; doing 
each particular act as a special favor or disfavor to the 
individual immediately concerned, sin in the old sense, 
as a highly imprudent defiance of such a God, is pass- 



56 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

ing too. Indeed, if that be sin, the sinner on such 
terms appeals to us as rather admirable and heroic. 
There is enough of the old Adam in most red-blooded 
males between the ages of fifteen and forty to shake 
the fist of defiance in the face of such a God, and leave 
his rules and regulations to be observed by such "plas- 
ter saints" as regard "safety first" as the supreme 
spiritual grace. The Gospel of Good Will, however, 
gives us an altogether different view of sin ; showing it 
not as a dash of bravado which evokes our admiration ; 
but as a taint of meanness which we pity and condemn. 
Bacteria and the animals seek their meat from God 
wherever they can find it : and if the body of an ani- 
mal, or the body of a man, offers the most attractive 
and available food, they take it without scruple or 
hesitation; without malice and without remorse. 
They seek their own good ; and fail to seek the good 
of their victims. Yet their action, evil as it is from 
the point of view of their victim, is not sin. In its 
/ethical aspect sin is the choice of a lesser in preference 
i to a greater good ; and the penalty is the loss of that 
greater specific good which the preferred lesser good 
displaces. In its religious aspect sin is the choice of 
some little specific good in preference to the greatest 
good of all — fellowship in Good Will with the Father, 



FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 57 

with Christ, and with Christian men and women : and 
the religious penalty for sin is the loss of that fellow- 
ship. To fail at one point in religion is to fail altogether. 
Good Will is one and all-inclusive : and deliberately to 
fall short of it at one point is to fall short of it altogether. 
We cannot take part of it and leave part of it, as a 

— superficial ethics permits us to do. Like an egg, re- 
ligious character and relationship is either wholly good 
or wholly bad. It cannot be part good and part bad. 
A single cherished sin shuts one completely out of real 
fellowship with God, and Christ, and Christian men. 

— A person, and a relation to a person, can't be spHt. 
--*We are either wholly for or wholly against Good Will. 

That is why religion is infinitely more searching and 
exacting than ethics. Customs, laws, public opinion 
can be divided, and the man who lives by these may 
be part good and part bad : generous and a drunkard, 
genial and a libertine, truthful and a brute. Good Will 
claims everything or nothing. The various ethical 
losses and the one unescapable religious loss will become 
clearer as we consider specific sins. 

Men fall into intemperance partly through physical 

\ craving for exhilaration ; partly through mental uneasi- 
ness and a desire to throw off care and anxiety ; mainly 

'through an impulse of good fellowship and con\dviality 



58 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

— a desire to share physical exhilaration and mental 
relaxation in congenial company. All these things are 
so far good : they are the premiums intemperance 
carries with it. If these things stood alone, and no 
losses were charged on the opposite page of the ledger, 
intemperance would be not sin but an unmixed good; 
and every man who didn't drink and gorge would be a 
sinner and a fool. 

Over against these little goods gained, however, 
stand greater goods lost : — self-control, employment, 
reputation, health, livelihood for himself and his family. 
These greater goods displaced measure the folly, the 
iniquity, the meanness of the sin of intemperance. 
The preacher's problem is to appreciate these little 
goods for which the glutton gorges, the drunkard drinks, 
and the drug victim takes his '^one more shot"; 
through such generous and fair appreciation to come into 
sympathetic relations with the intemperate man; and 
then to make him feel how insignificant they all are in 
comparison to the steady nerves, the strong will, the 
regular business, the happy family, the comfortable 
home he is allowing them to displace. If the intem- 
perate man can be made to see that, he will see that 
intemperance is not the brave, smart, genial, generous 
thing it seems under the bright lights of the club or bar- 



FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 59 

room; but the cowardly, stupid, weak, mean thing 
that it is. When he sees that and is thoroughly ashamed 
of himself, he is in a mood to believe you when you tell 
him that no man who does such a mean and cruel thing 
can have part or lot in God's Good Will which is work- 
ing in the world to make it kind, happy and whole- 
some : no comradeship with Christ who came to make 
that Good Will plain and winsome : no fellowship with 
the great and goodly company of men and women 
who have Good Will as the spirit of their lives. Not 
until, on the basis of a hearty appreciation of the little 
good for the sake of which he drinks or overeats, or 
takes drugs, we have made him feel the misery and 
meanness of the losses he inflicts on himself and others : 
— not until then have we preached the whole of the 
sane and searching Gospel of Jesus Christ to that in- 
temperate man. 

Licentiousness has its roots in passions implanted in 
man for good. Nature does not allow any generation 
to be more than one remove from their normal inten- 
sity. Keen pleasures, physical, aesthetic and social, 
are attached as premiums to the fulfilment of their 
functions. What wonder that youth seizes eagerly 
and recklessly on these offered goods. Unless one enters 
sympathetically into the force and worth of all the good 



i 



60 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

there is in sensuous pleasure, he will not be in a posi- 
tion to preach to young men the fearful losses that are 
charged up against the libertine. For the penalties 
are tremendous. By long, slow, sacrificial struggle, 
/ by fearful social ostracism inflicted on women who are 
either the authors or the victims of sexual sin, the race 
has built up the pure home; its most beneficent and 
beautiful institution. To the extent of his ability 
the libertine tears that laboriously reared structure 
down, and deprives some unfortunate woman, or a 
whole class of such women, of their birthright of love, 
loyalty, respect and protection in a pure and happy 
home. Whoever for a little passing pleasure can ruin 
human happiness ; break the hearts of grieving parents ; 
doom to desolation and probable disease innocent and 
guilty alike, is mean and contemptible. He is un- 
doing civilization's most costly and beneficent work. 
Reared himself in a pure home ; desiring it for his own 
sisters and daughters; he is seeking to make a mean 
exception in his own favor to the way he desires other 
men to treat them. Such conduct, however strongly 
urged to it by forces which Nature has found essential 
to the perpetuation of the race, marks a man as 
altogether contrary to God's Good Will; incompatible 
with the character of Christ; antithetic to that Spirit 



FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 6l 

of Good Will which binds all pure, brave men and women 
together in Christian fellowship. 

The preacher has not preached the Gospel to good 
purpose unless his community as a whole, and every 
individual in it, has been brought to look on licentious- 
ness, not indeed without intelligent sympathy for the 
mighty forces that drive and drag men and women 
into it, but with such a sense of the essential meanness 
of any man or woman who condescends to buy per- 
sonal pleasure at such a fearful price in social deteriora- 
tion and human degradation, las shall make them treat 
it, whether in others or in themselves or in their chil- 
dren, as a loathsome, cruel, dastardly disgrace. 

Gambling is another of the Devil's sweet-shaped lies. 
It comes disguised as a form of Good Will. We love 
excitement, uncertainty, risk : and a few dimes or dol- 
lars add these elements to what would otherwise be a 
dull and tame affair. When both parties can afford 
to lose, a little bet adds zest to the contest or game. 
To refuse seems churlish and timid ; to make the wager 
seems generous and brave. 

Yet there is a fallacy in this phrase ''can afford to 
lose." Either the loss makes a difference or it doesn't. 
If it does, it involves an unsocial attitude. If it doesn't, 
then it is useless ; and might as well be omitted. 



62 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

The tendency and example of gambling even on a 
small scale, for social good-fellowship, lends encourage- 
ment to gambling on a more serious scale; involving 
grievous hardship to the loser, and loss of reliance for 
gains on productive industry to both winner and loser. 
The man of Good Will, if he thinks his way through to 
the consequences and influences that flow from gambling, 
will refuse to have anything to do with it. If much is 
evil, as all admit, the tendency and influence of even a 
V little cannot be good. 

Speculation in its unadulterated form is gambling, 
and begets the gambler's anti-social attitude. The 
direction of capital into sound and useful channels of 
production is honest and honorable, an expression of 
the capitalist's Good Will. But that involves expert 
knowledge, which in turn involves keen mental labor. 
The shrewd investor is, whether intentionally or not, 
a public benefactor. He puts capital at the disposal of 
enterprises that effectively serve real needs ; and with- 
holds capital from those that are doomed to fail. So 
long as the present economic order lasts the capitalist 
has as important a function as the laborer. 

When, however, one merely ^^ takes a flier"; bets on 
the strength of rumor, tip, or guesswork that some- 
thing of whose management, resources, prospects, and 



FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 63 

processes he knows next to nothing will go up or down ; 
he is contributing nothing. If in the long run he gains 
(which is very unlikely), he is getting something out 
of society he doesn't deserve and hasn't earned. If 
in the long run he loses (as in ninety-nine cases out of a 
hundred he will), he gets precisely what he deserves. 
Worse, however, than the money lost is the loss of 
reliance on regular industry; the impatience with slow, 
sure earnings; the precarious financial status of his 
family; the irresponsible, unsocial, and ultimately anti- 
social attitude toward the world, which the habit of 
speculation entails. We cannot rely for strenuous 
social service, and costly sacrifice of time and money, 
on any man who is intent on getting rich quick by the 
rise and fall of securities to the management and study 
of which he brings no intimate knowledge. Just in 
proportion as the speculative habit grows, will in- 
dustry, domestic security, and social service dwindle 
and decline. 

Laziness is native to us all. Leisure, loafing, is delight- 
ful ; and the love of it nature has put into us abundantly 
as a means of self-preservation. The good-natured, 
care-free loafer appeals to us. As compared to the 
fuming, fretting busybody, who is forever on the rack 
of exertion, there is a good deal to be said for him ; as 



( 



64 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

Stevenson has shown in his " Apology for Idlers." Yet 
on the other side of the account we find poverty; if 
the man have no inherited or otherwise gratuitous 
wealth; and even if he has, we find the shirking of 
services which his fellows and society need. With so 
much that needs to be done in the home, the school, 
the state, charity, reform, science, art, literature, the 
man or woman who retires at night with nothing use- 
ful accomplished is a pauper and a parasite : unworthy 
to be called a servant and son of Good Will ; unworthy 
of the name of Christian; unworthy of the fellowship 
of earnest and arduous Christian men and women. 
Not until all the idlers, rich or poor, are heartily 
ashamed of themselves, and everybody in the com- 
munity looks on the sin of idleness as disgraceful, has 
the Gospel been rightly preached. 

Frivolity has its roots in a hereditary love of excite- 
ment. Our ancestors lived on the perilous edge of 
life; were compelled to be alert to protect themselves 
against wild beasts and hostile tribes, to find game for 
food, and pasture for their flocks and herds. Cards 
and dancing, the '^movies" and the theater, the trolley 
and the automobile, place artificial excitement and un- 
necessary motion within the reach of us all. And 
many there be, especially of women, who go in at these 



FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 65 

open doors of opportunity for frivolous dissipation. 
There is good in it all. It is better to be excited than 
I to be depressed; it is better to be on the move than 
I to sit still and mope. But when there is so much suflEer- 
ing to be relieved ; so much knowledge to be acquired 
and diffused; so much wrong to be righted; so much 
sympathy needed; it is a burning shame that at the 
end of the day, the week, the month, the season, any 
man or any woman should have to show as good ac- 
comphshed only so many luncheons and dinners eaten ; 
so many cards shuffled; so many miles travelled; so 
many plays or pictures seen; so many dances and 
parties attended. As incidental diversions ; as dessert 
after the roast beef of usefulness and the salad of help- 
fulness, these amusements have their important place. 
j It is a great mistake to overlook the good they each and 
\ all contain, or to condemn or prohibit specific amuse- 
ments. But to give up to them the whole or any con- 
siderable proportion of one's life, is to withdraw from 
the ranks of the useful and serviceable ; to fall short of 
Good Will; to lose touch with Christ; and to miss 
altogether the fellowship in service which binds true 
Christians together in the spirit of active Good Will. 
The Gospel has not been preached as it should be until 
every one within hearing has been made thoroughly and 



66 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

heartily ashamed of indulging for themselves or tolerat- 
ing for their children a life of meaningless excitement, 
with its inevitable cost and counterpart of strength and 
steadiness undeveloped, duties undone, services shirked, 
and opportunities thrown away. 

Unkindness saves a great deal of effort. It is easier 
to snap and snarl; to upbraid and find fault; to be 
cross and hateful ; than to take the trouble to appreciate 
the feelings of others and control speech and conduct 
with a view to causing as little pain and as much pleas- 
ure as a just consideration of mutual claims permits. 
Wherever a sad heart can be made happy or a wrong 
will set right, there is an open door into Good Will: 
and whoever, from unimaginative laziness and hard- 
heartedness refuses to enter it, or turns his back upon 
it, shuts himself out from that kindliness which is the 
heart of God, the soul of Christ, and the Spirit in which 
all true Christians live and love. 

Jealousy, envy, fill a little soul full of its own im- 
portance. If it could have this premium of being 
puffed up, and pay no corresponding penalty, then 
these qualities would be virtues; petty virtues to be 
sure, but not the pitiful sins they are. The penalty is 
inevitable: a soul full of self has no room for eager 
interest in other things and generous devotion to other 



FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 67 

r 

I persons ; no chance to share the Good Will which ranks 
/ others at least on an equality with ourselves. So long 
as we are shut in with our own envy and jealousy, we 
are automatically and hermetically excluded from the 
Christian fellowship. 
/'^ Censoriousness, likewise, is a cheap and easy device 
for securing the sense of self -exaltation. To call another 
man stingy, unless it be in sorrow and with a view to his 
reformation, implies that I am generous by contrast. 
To point out with glee the impurity of another gives 
me a false sense of the purity of my own contrasted 
heart. When I denounce the hypocrite, except in pity "^ 
and desire for his conversion, I cannot help drawing, 
and hoping others will draw, the inference that I by 
contrast am sincere. But to pay for these specious 
emotional gains, I lose the sympathy I ought to feel for 
others, as well as the modest sense of my own short- 
comings. In judging others I condemn myself as guilty 
of having a soul just big enough to take in the evil, but 
not big enough to take in the good, in other men and 
women. Into such a soul the great-hearted Father, 
the compassionate Christ, the Spirit of Good Will by 
\ no possibility can come and take up their abode. 

Conceit and pride are closely akin to censoriousness. 
They swell out one's vanity ; and give the semblance of 



68 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

greatness to the soul that harbors them. But the proud 
heart is so hollow ; the conceited soul is so empty ; that 
it is a fearful price one has to pay for indulging in these 
expensive spiritual sedatives. Not to the proud and 
conceited; but to the meek and the poor in spirit is 
assured the blessedness of Christian fellowship. 

Cowardice is good so far as it saves one's skin ; but 
it becomes detestable when it costs the repudiation of 
one's convictions ; the failure to stand up for unpopular 
reforms; the refusal to risk life for country. The 
shame that is heaped upon the coward is the measure 
of the worth of the interests he allows to go unprotected 
and unserved in order to save and protect himself. 
Obviously no coward can share Good Will with the Christ 
who suffered crucifixion rather than fail to bear witness 
to the truth the Father gave him to see and serve. 

Treachery is even worse than cowardice ; for cowardice 
is merely saving oneself from general risks and dangers. 
Treachery is the betrayal of some special cause with 
which we are intimately identified; the benefits and 
fellowship of which we have enjoyed ; and for the loyal 
support of which we have given some explicit or tacit 
pledge. To betray such a cause, or the person who 
represents it, as Judas did Jesus for thirty pieces of 
silver, is almost the lowest depth of meanness into which 



FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 69 

sin can bring a man. To be sure even here some good 
is sought and gained: the thirty silver pieces have 
their normal purchasing power even in the hands of the 
traitor : but all that they can buy is so insignificant in 
comparison with the honor lost by treachery, that their 
value in comparison is negligible ; and treachery stands 
out as almost wholly and inexcusably mean. No traitor 
can have a place in the Kingdom of which the Father's 
Good Will is the rule; Christ's sacrifice the supreme 
inspiration ; and the spirit of loyalty and mutual devo- 
tion the very breath of life. 

The good the traitor seeks ; his office, or position, or 
bribe money, however insignificant and contemptible, 
is at least substantial. The hypocrite gets nothing but 
the favorable opinion of those whom he deceives ; and 
even that favorable opinion is given not to what he is, 
but to what he pretends to be. The hypocrite parts 
company with all reality. 

Hypocrites are of two kinds : those who pretend to 
be better than they are; who were the more common 
in New Testament times ; and those who pretend to be 

'^ worse than they are; who are the more common, 
especially among young people, at the present day. 

^ Whatever the form, the essence of hypocrisy is the same 
• — an entire absence of genuineness — the posing as 



70 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

something one is not. Obviously Good Will, as it lives 

in the Father, as it flashes out in Christ^ scorn of the 

Scribes and Pharisees, as it dwells in the hearts of all 

genuine Christian men and women, is infinitely removed 

from the posing of the hypocrite. Meanness, smallness, 

the selling of the birthright for a mess of pottage, — 

which is the essence of all sin, — can go no farther down 

f than this ; that one ceases really to be himself and be- 

I comes merely an impression — false at that — imposed 

\on the minds of others. 

Lying, too, has the double aspect common to all sin. 
In its meaner forms it is a device for shirking responsi- 
biHty, escaping criticism, defrauding customer or credi- 
tor, and springs from the innocent instinct of social 
self-preservation. In its higher forms, as used by cul- 
tivated people, it is a generous desire to be more enter- 
s—staining than a plain statement of the case will warrant ; 
to deck out a situation in colors contributed by the 
narrator's ^' happy artistry." Many of the most charm- 
ing women in the world, some of the world's most 
famous men, especially those of the military and sports- 
man types, are half-unconsciously addicted to lying as 
the most natural way of making themselves and their 
i experiences interesting. 

On the other hand, lying of all kinds tends to break 



FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 7I 

down confidence between man and man ; and, by crying 
^^wolf when there is no wolf, to invite disaster when 
the real wolf appears. The liar refuses to dwell in the 
same world of mutual understanding with his fellows; 
he shuts them out of his little hfe, and in so doing shuts 
himself out of theirs. People learn to distrust him, 
and in distrusting him to distrust human nature/ Lying 
is intellectual highway robbery; and its penalty is 
mental solitary confinement. 

Stealing has the same two aspects that are the com- 
mon marks of sin. A man wants something which 
belongs to another. He wants it very badly. He is 
poor, and the man who has it is so rich that he would 
never miss it. Or the chance to steal is so general and 
indirect that the man from whom he steals will not 
even know that anything has been taken from him. 
This is the case in the more prevalent forms of stealing 
to-day; the steaUng that is carried on by respectable 
citizens and honored church members in every branch 
of industry, commerce, and poHtics. I want to support 
my family a little better, or give my son a more expen- 
sive education, or maintain my daughter in a wealthy 
social circle. I cannot do these things if I confine my- 
self to producing goods or rendering services which I 
offer to the world at their current market value. But I 



( 



72 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

can do these things very easily if I organize a corpora- 
tion and take, as unfortunately the laws of certain states 
allow me to take, a large block of the stock for com- 
paratively worthless property or insignificant services. 
I can do these things if, as director of a railroad, I use 
my power as the representative of the stockholders and 
the trustee of the public to get portions of the road 
built by a construction company in which I have an 
interest; and then, as a member of the construction 
company, sell to the railroad in which I am a director 
the constructed road at several thousand dollars a mile 
more than its construction cost. I can do these things 
for my wife and children if, holding a majority of stock 
in a corporation, I sell it to parties who will use the 
controlling interest thus acquired, to make the stock of 
the minority stockholders comparatively worthless. I 
can do these things if, as owner of a controlling interest, 
I use the power it gives me to vote exorbitant salaries 
to myself and my friends, or to withhold dividends and 
pile up a surplus until the poorer stockholders are com- 
pelled to sell for less than it would be worth if the busi- 
ness were fairly managed. 

I can do these things if I buy things which I am un- 
able to pay for ; if I use my political influence and posi- 
tion to secure franchises, favors, exemptions, which will 



FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 73 

allow me to make profit out of the public loss. These 
and countless similar forms of stealing all have at their 
core the innocent and laudable desire to make money, 
gain power, secure position for myself, my family, and 
my friends. All that is praiseworthy. The presence 
of this ambition is an indication of many personal, 
domestic, and social virtues. We cannot withhold a 
certain admiration and affection from thieves of this 
type, whom we meet in business, in society, at the club, 
and even at church. 

On the other hand, when we realize how ruthlessly 
they strip the hard-working man of the savings of a 
lifetime ; how they impoverish the widow and orphan ; 
how every honest workingman in the community has to 
work harder and live poorer to make up for his share 
of the general loss that corresponds to their dishonest 
gains, we despise the methods by which these men have 
gained their wealth. 

Murder is a widely prevalent form of sin to-day. 
In saying this, I do not refer to the rapidly increasing 
number of cases of violence and bloodshed. Alarming 
as that is, it is but an insignificant fraction of the total 
murder that goes on in our modern Christian civiliza- 
tion. As Professor Ross has pointed out in his '^Sin 
and Society,'' the modern assassin "wears immaculate 



74 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

linen, carries a silk hat and a lighted cigar, sins with a 
calm countenance and a serene soul, leagues or months 
from the evil he causes. Upon his gentlemanly presence 
the eventual blood and tears do not intrude themselves. 
This is why good, kindly men let the wheels of com- 
merce and of industry redden and redden, rather than 
pare or lose their dividends. This is why our railroads 
yearly injure one employee in twenty-six, and we look 
in vain for that promised ^ day of the Lord ' that ' will 
make a man more precious than fine gold.' Our iniquity 
is wireless, and we know not whose withers are wrung 
by it. The purveyor of spurious life-preservers need 
not be a Cain. The owner of rotten tenement houses, 
whose 'puir enables him to ignore the orders of the 
health department, foredooms babies, it is true, but for 
all that he is no Herod. The mob lynches the red- 
handed slayer, when it ought to keep a gallows Haman- 
high for the venal mine-inspector, the seller of infected 
milk, the maintainer of a fire- trap theatre." 

The murderers we meet in every walk of life to-day, 
members of every club or church we join, present in 
evening dress at almost every dinner or party, like the 
thieves previously considered, are simply the men who 
want big dividends with which to maintain their families 
in luxury, and do not inquire too curiously how many 



FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 75 

human Kves they needlessly shorten to increase those 
dividends, or how many human heads they cut off with 
their coupons. 

Statistics of a year's accidents to workingmen in 
Allegheny County, in which Pittsburg is located, pub- 
lished in the Nation of March i8, 1909, show that 
526 men were killed in that county by industrial acci- 
dents in the twelve months from July i, 1906, to June 
30, 1907. In addition 2000 were seriously injured, of 
whom 500 were so crippled as to be discharged from 
the hospitals permanent wrecks. While the speed and 
pressure of the work render a large number of these acci- 
dents unavoidable, in a group of cases investigated 35 
per cent were attributable to the employers' negligence ; 
in other words, the employers preferred to commit that 
amount of murder rather than pay the slight cost of 
life-saving precautions and devices. 

In Bangor, Maine, a family moved into a tenement 
which had previously been occupied by a patient sick 
with tuberculosis. The landlord neither informed the 
incoming tenant of the fact, nor had the house disin- 
fected. The child of the family died of tuberculosis in 
consequence. When asked why he did not have the 
house disinfected, the landlord excused himself on the 
ground that he could not afford the ten dollars, more or 



76 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

less, which it would cost. Murder for ten dollars is a 
depth of depravity to which most bandits would scorn 
to condescend. 

The rookery landlord and the jerry-builder, the adul- 
terator and the maker and vendor of deleterious patent 
medicines, the quack doctor and charlatan ^^ healer," 
the purveyor of polluted water and infected milk, the 
man who fails to fence dangerous machinery and provide 
safety couplers for his cars, the owners of unsanitary 
tenements and fire-trap theatres, the men who over- 
work children, and employ women on conditions fatal 
to either health or character, — these murderers, num- 
bered by hundreds, and whose victims are counted by 
tens of thousands, are the ones who do the wholesale 
human slaughter of to-day. There are a hundred times 
as many men guilty of murder through commercial com- 
phcity in the United States to-day as there were five 
hundred years ago, when the bow and arrow and the 
tomahawk were the weapons employed. In so far as 
preventable disease and calamity exist in our communi- 
ties, we all are sharers in responsibihty for the murders 
their permitted continuance entails. 

What shall we do about it ? What has Good Will to 
say ? We must call it by its plain hard name of murder 
every chance we get. We must make the men who are 



FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 77 

guilty feel themselves to be the murderers they are. 
We must make their practices so odious, that every 
decent man will be ashamed to have a hand in them. 

The great demand of the hour is ethical insight; to 
point out in precise terms the meanness and cruelty and 
misery-producing power of specific sins. If the pro- 
moter of dishonest business schemes could see the priva- 
tion in country homes, where the hard earnings of years 
of toil are swept away by the floods of water with which 
he has diluted the stock they purchased in good faith ; 
if the Hcentious man could see the years of agony and 
degradation, released at last by squaKd and ignominious 
death, which the victims of his passing pleasure must 
drag out in consequence of what he and men Hke him 
have made of them; if the inconsiderate husband, the 
merciless employer, the gHb scandalmonger, the corrupt 
legislator, the reckless speculator, could be made to see 
just what their conduct means in want and woe and 
lingering pain and premature death to their innocent 
and helpless victims, they would speedily repent and 
mend their ways. 

Sin in all its forms ; the sinner in all his disguises ; is 
foolish, mean, contemptible ; utterly and irreconcilably 
opposed to and estranged from Good Will, Christ, 
and the Spirit in Christian men. To make that fact so 



78 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

plain that the wayfaring man cannot fail to see it, and 
feel it, and take it to heart, is the second task of the 
preacher : second only to the first task of making men 
see and beheve in Christ's great expectation of entire 
Good Will. Good Will is the primary fact; for until 
that is seen and felt you cannot make men see and feel 
by contrast the meanness and disgrace of falUng short 
of it. The best you can do is to conjure up some fright- 
ful image of punishment in the hereafter. That fright- 
fulness in God we no longer fear; any more than we 
respect it in men who adopt it as a miUtary policy. 
God is light and in him is no darkness at all. His Will 
is altogether, always, and toward everybody good. 
Christ revealed that goodness; Christian men and 
women reproduce it ; and the really dreadful penalty of 
sin, in addition to the specific goods forfeited by it, is 
the unworthiness of fellowship with God, with Christ, i 
and with Christian men which cherished sin entails. 
To make that fearful loss, that dreadful penalty felt as 
the supreme wretchedness it is; and so drive men to 
escape from it in penitence, confession, and conversion, 
is the second task of the preacher. Not the cheap and 
discredited terror of problematical vengeful torment in 
the hereafter ; but the loss of fellowship with God and 
Christ and all who have the Spirit of Good Will — this 



FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 79 

is the weapon of the true Christian minister against the 
ever present hydra-headed monster sin. To wield that 
weapon efifectively is doubtless much harder than to 
brandish the old red battle-axe of an arbitrary damna- 
tion ; and requires of the minister more Christlike gifts 
of mind and heart. Already we see rising among us a 
ministry that shall be able to make men loath, hate and 
repent of sin because they see and feel the meanness 
and hideousness of it as contrasted with Good Will to 
others and to all which Christ and Christian men reveal, 
and which it is their supreme privilege to serve and 
share. 



Ill 

RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL: REPENTANCE AND 

FORGIVENESS 

"I have put myself on trial in the court of conscience and a 
verdict has been rendered of * guilty' — guilty of having lived 
for many years of my life indifferent to and ignorant of what was 
going on behind these walls. I want to see for myself exactly 
what your life is like, not as viewed from the outside looking in, 
but from the inside looking out. For somehow, deep down, I 
have the feeling that after I have really lived among you, marched 
in your lines, shared your food, gone to the same cells at night, and 
in the morning looked out at the pieces of God's sunlight through 
the same iron bars — that then, and not until then, can I feel the 
knowledge which will break down the barriers between my soul 
and the souls of my brothers." Thomas Mott Osborne. Within 
Prison WallSy pp. i6 and i8. 

My text is taken from the speech to the inmates of 
the New York State Prison at Auburn by the chairman 
of the Commission on Prison Reform appointed by the 
Governor, who was about to serve a week's imprison- 
ment with them. At the conclusion of the speech from 
which the text is taken the inmates asked about him 

80 



RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 8l 

the question that was asked about Jesus, ^' What manner 
of man is this?" 

Another speech made by Mr. Osborne September 25, 
191 5, in reply to the critics of his administration as 
Warden of Sing Sing, will serve as our morning lesson. 
Whatever we may think about this or that method he 
has employed, we can't fail to detect in this speech the 
true Christian ring of a costly Good Will for the 
prisoners. 

^^In all earnestness I say to you that Sing Sing could 
stand my death, but Sing Sing could not stand my re- 
moval. I love my home and children as you do. They 
are far away while I am at work down there in Sing 
Sing. I'm doing my bit. Can you afford to let me 
go home? (Loud shouts of ^^No.") It's more impor- 
tant to you and to the State than to me. I can afford 
to go home to those I love and end my days in the spot 
I love. But the State cannot afford to let me go — 
yet. 

"I don't expect to stay there long; I don't expect to 
live long. A man can't stand it — can't stand the 
responsibility of control over the destinies of so many 
of his fellow-men, for I'm Czar of Sing Sing. I feel the 
strain and I want to go home. But I won't go home until 
I find a man to take my place and to carry on the work 

G 



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82 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

I have tried to start. I am proud of it, but the real 
credit belongs to the boys behind the bars, for no one 
can save them ; they must save themselves. 

^^Men who are sent to Sing Sing are no longer trying 
to escape the reputation of having been in Sing Sing. 
They advertise the fact. A young man the other day 
advertised for a job, and in the advertisement said he 
had just come from Sing Sing. It's my job to find out 
how Sing Sing can be turned from a curse into a bless- 
ing, and I pray your help. 

^^Now, I have been pictured as a sentimentalist. 
That is not true. I am no worshipper of sentiment, 
but I am a devotee of common sense. I have no sym- 
pathy with crime, nor have I any sympathy with the 
criminal. But I have a fellow-feehng. I repeat, I have 
no sympathy with the criminal, and no soft-hearted 
man has any business dealing with crime or criminals. 

"I have, as I see it, just two duties to the State. 
One is to keep my charges in Sing Sing, and the other is 
to see that they become capable and desirous of leading 
useful lives when they get out. Under the old system 
no wonder they came out brutes. Now, do you want 
these men, who are leaving Sing Sing at the rate of 
fifteen hundred a year, to go out vindictive, ready to get 
their revenge for the hell they have been through; or 



RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 83 

do you want them to go out feeling that the scale has 
been balanced; that they have paid and are square 
with the world and not ashamed of having paid ? There 
is no choice. A man who feels right with the world is a 
better citizen than the man who wants to get even. 
Life and property are safer. 

''You have all heard a lot about escapes from Sing 
Sing. I'll tell you the truth. Since December there 
have been three escapes. That's less than there ever 
was before in that time. Why, people talk about 
escapes from Sing Sing as if it were a new invention. 
They have always been escaping from Sing Sing. 

^'Let me correct another impression. There is no 
trafl&c in 'dope' at Sing Sing. There are plenty of 
ways to get it; there always were plenty of ways to 
get it in Sing Sing. Why don't they use it. Because 
they know it is best not to ; they know that the Mutual 
Welfare League will lose its privileges if the members 
use drugs. It is no rengious or moral motive back of 
it ; it is selfishness. But it works. The whole system 
of responsibility works because it is human nature to 
rise to responsibility. 

^'I am asked, Where is the punishment? I reply, 
I am not a behever in mere punishment that has no end 
in view. BrutaUty never made a better man. Punish- 



84 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

ment ? When you send a man to prison, when you take 
his liberty away, you have already inflicted the most 
terrible punishment you can inflict. It isn't the ma- 
terial discomforts that make a prison. I have suffered 
more physical discomforts in camp than I have in 
Auburn prison. Do they want to get rid of me and 
have a return to the old brutality? To keep a man in 
a cell and make him take drugs to forget — that is not 
only brutality, that is blasphemy. When you take 
away the right of speech, God's most precious gift, 
you make a man a brute. 

"But, men and women, here is an experiment of 
immense importance to the whole civilized world — it 
is a determination of the question. Can democracy deal 
with the prison problem? It is not so much a problem 
of having men safe in prison ; it is a problem of keeping 
them safe after they get out." 

Here we have the stuff Christian forgiveness is made 
of — sacrifi,ce of ease, comfort, home, and shortening of 
life : no sympathy with crime or the criminal as such : 
fellow-feeling for the man who has been a criminal: a 
desire and a plan for his restoration to emplojnnent and 
the Good Will of the Christian community: firm pro- 
tection of society with no brutality in the treatment of 
the wrong-doer: the transformation of the prisoners 



RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 85 

from vindictive foes of society, to its disciplined and 
well-disposed servants. 

Mr. Osborne has been persecuted and maligned as 
Jesus was, and every reformer has been and will be. 
But what is reviling, persecution and false accusation, 
compared to having a convict say of one, as a convict 
in Sing Sing said to Mr. Shuster, as reported in the 
Independent for July 19, 1915. 

^^I tell you Tom Osborne has the right idea, and he's 
carrying it out wonderfully. He is making the State 
prison what it ought to be — a place not for the sup- 
pression of all that is human in us, but a place for the 
making of good citizens to go back to society. Under 
the old system, if you weren't a criminal before you 
entered Sing Sing, they made one of you before you 
went out. Now it's just reversed. If there is any- 
thing wrong with you when you come in, they take it 
out of you before you leave. And they do it, not by 
brute force, but by fair play and common sense." 

After making all necessary deduction for this con- 
vict's optimism, the mere fact that he expresses himself 
in this cordial way shows that he at least, if not every 
convict, is responding to Christian treatment with 
genuine appreciation and heart-felt gratitude. 

To condemn sin is easy. It comes natural to the 



86 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

censoriousness of our hard unregenerate hearts. To 
condemn sin with a sympathetic appreciation of the 
genuine goods for the sake of which men are drawn into 
it, is less easy and more rare. Yet, as we have seen, 
this is what every preacher who would be a power for 
good in a community must do. A still harder task, 
however, awaits preacher and layman alike. Having 
condemned the sin ; we must invite the sinner to repent- 
ance with full assurance of the forgiveness of his sins by 
God, by Christ, and by ourselves and our fellows, so far 
as we are sharers with Christ in the Father's Good Will. 
Repentance begins in a man as soon as he sees, feels 
and confesses how large the goods lost are in compari- 
son to the little goods his sin has gained. The prodigal 
son thinks first of the food in the father's house ; later 
of the father and his forgiveness. Yet repentance is 
not complete and permanent until the penitent has some 
sense of Good Will toward him, either in his fellow-man, 
or Christ, or the Father, and some assurance of being 
taken back into a fellowship in which he is looked on 
not with condemnation for the sin he has committed, 
but with favor in view of his repudiation of it. It is 
only as it is thrown onto the background of Good Will 
that sin is felt as not merely the loss of this or that 
specific good and therefore folly ; but as the failure to 



RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 87 

come up to the best in personal worth and relationship, 
and therefore needing repentance. Repentance and 
offered forgiveness must go hand in hand. A man can 
be sorry he is in a scrape, and wish he were well out of 
it : a man can confess that he is a fool and lament the 
greater goods he has lost : but he can't repent until he 
believes and feels Good Will welcoming him, mean and 
contemptible as he has been, into its noble fellowship 
and service. 

Christianity is the good news that no sin is too heinous 
to be forgiven provided the one who has committed it 
repents. For proof it points first to Christ praying for 
his murderers, *' Father, forgive them, for they know 
not what they do." He appealed to his Father's Good 
Will, knowing that it could not withhold forgiveness 
from any penitent. He exemplified it in his own atti- 
tude. "Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killeth the 
prophets, and stoneth them that are sent unto her : how 
often would I have gathered thy children together, even 
as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and 
ye would not!" What is more to the point, Christ 
expects his followers to be so filled with the Spirit of 
Good Will that until seventy times seven they will for- 
give repented sin and restore to favor and friendly 
intercourse the repentant sinner. 



88 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

Hence our willingness to forgive serves a double pur- 
pose. It is the proof of God's forgiveness of our short- 
comings : for Good Will in God cannot be less and lower 
than Good Will in ourselves. It is at the same time 
the best evidence of our fellowship with the Father 
and with Christ: for forgiveness is the hardest task 
Good Will has to face; and if we are equal to 
that until seventy times seven: if, in other words, 
willingness to forgive unto the uttermost is our per- 
manent attitude, then we share Good Will in its most 
vital and exacting expression. It thus becomes the 
preacher's privilege to assure every man who has done 
wrong of complete forgiveness; by the Father and 
Christ as the witness of the Father: and also by all 
true Christians who share the Father's Good Will and 
have the Christlike Spirit. A man who would not for- 
give the worst wrong, even if done directly against 
himself, or against those dear to him, when satisfied 
that the wrong-doer was truly penitent, would be out 
of Good Will; no son of the Father; no brother of 
Christ; no sharer of the Christian Spirit. A Christ 
who did not so forgive would be no savior of the world ; 
no witness to Good Will. A God who would not forgive 
at the first sign of genuine penitence would be no God 
of Good Will, but a Devil; meriting not the worship 



RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 89 

and praise but the scorn and contempt of ChristKke 
men. Forgiveness of the repentant wrong-doer is so 
essential an attribute of God, so fundamental a quality 
of the Christ]ike Spirit, that God could not be God; 
Christ could not be Christ ; the Christian could not be 
a Christian without it. 

Are we Christians then? Can we rise to this high 
calling? In my brief pastorate I found that the hardest 
task I had to undertake was not to convert sinners, 
which is comparatively easy if you are dealing with the 
grosser types of sin, but to induce the Christian people 
of the Church to welcome into vital fellowship and 
cordial social recognition the reformed drunkard and 
the repentant woman who had gone astray. Unless 
the preacher succeeds in developing the forgiving spirit 
in his people: not the forgiving spirit in general in 
church on Sunday; but the forgiving spirit toward in- 
dividual offenders who have directly or indirectly 
injured individuals; the Christian Church is only a 
heathen body in a Christian dress; and preaching is 
only a parrot-like repetition of platitudes. The vital 
Christian preacher toward each repented sin, then, has 
a double task : to assure the offender that God forgives 
him and to bring himself and his fellow-Christians into 
the forgiving spirit toward him. 



90 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

The preaching of Christianity, then, with reference 
to drunkenness and the drunkard, should be that any 
man who has been guilty of this sin; and who has 
come to see and feel how contrary it is to Good 
Will ; who is sincerely sorry for the cruel wrong it has 
done; and who puts it from him in sorrow and loath- 
ing; is as welcome a child of the Father as the tem- 
perate man who never went astray; is a brother of 
Jesus Christ; and entitled to as kindly and courteous 
a reception by Christian people as the holiest saint. 
Can you then greet with cordial Christian friendliness 
the man who has led your son into dissipation and dis- 
grace? Suffering as you do the sorrow and shame his 
sin has brought to you and those dear to you, can you 
still forgive him when he repents ? If you can, God's 
Good Will is in you; Christ is with you; of such as 
you are the Kingdom of Heaven. If you can't you have 
yet to learn the first rudiments of Christian living. 

Can you forgive the man who has led your sister or 
daughter astray; filling her life with bitterness and 
shame, and your heart and home with sorrow and 
humiliation? Can you restore to your friendship a 
man or woman who has bought their selfish sensual 
pleasure at such a tremendous cost of pain and misery 
to you and yours, on evidence that he too shares the 



RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 9 1 

pain and misery he has caused, and loathes himself for 
having done it ? If you can, you are in Good Will. If 
you couldn't or wouldn't, you are not a Christian, not 
in Good Will toward that repentant offender; but a 
heathen breathing out evil against one who, however 
evil he has been, is now repentant of evil and seeking 
good : and therefore is in his actual present attitude 
and intent a nobler man, a purer woman, than you 
with your hard and unforgiving heart toward him on 
account of his repented past. 

Toward the lazy, shiftless, inefficient, incompetent 
employee ; who is sorry for the waste and loss and in- 
jury his incompetence has caused ; can you be apprecia- 
tive, friendly, cordial, kindly? I don't ask. Can you 
take him back and retain him in your employ? Some- 
times that is right, and sometimes it is not. Forgive- 
ness does not always involve restoration to previous 
status. A railroad superintendent cannot rightly take 
back a careless switchman, however penitent; for he 
owes more to the thousands of passengers than to the 
single switchman. A theological seminary president 
cannot rightly retain a Hstless professor, however sorry 
he may be for his shortcomings ; for it owes more to its 
hundreds of students, and the tens of thousands in their 
future congregations than it does to that one uninspir- 



92 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

ing teacher and his dependent family. But the super- 
intendent of the railroad, the president of the Seminary 
can, and if a Christian must, feel a personal kindliness 
for the man he is compelled by ofl&cial duty to discharge. 
Whether he retain him if he can ; whether he discharge 
him if he must, the employer if he will himself remain 
son, brother, sharer in Good Will, must retain or 
discharge him, if he is truly sorry for his inefficiency, 
with something of the same sorrow and suffering which 
the repentant employee feels. Vicarious suffering; the 
innocent for the guilty; was not enacted once for all 
some nineteen centuries ago. It is the law of Christian 
living in every vital relation of life, like that of em- 
ployer and employee, yesterday, to-day and forever. 

Toward the frivolous young man or woman, if he or 
she comes to a sense of his or her wicked worthlessness, 
and is sorry for it and ashamed of it ; we may have to 
be officially hard: if, for instance, we happen to be 
school principals or college presidents with intellectual 
standards to maintain : but if we are Christians, if we 
live in Good Will, we are bound to have kind hearts, 
good wishes and a forbearing spirit; and as far as our 
personal feelings toward them go, give them as cordial 
an appreciation and as sympathetic a treatment as we 
have for their more diligent brothers and sisters who 



RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 93 

through the whole trying eleven hours bear the burden 
and heat of scholastic requirement. 

A man has slandered us : injured our standing with 
persons for whom we care: and subjected us to dis- 
trust, criticism, defeat and injury. Later, too late to 
undo the harm, he comes to us and says he is sorry. 
Can we feel toward him the kindliness one child of God 
should feel for another? If we are sharers with Christ 
and our fellow-Christians in Good Will we can. And if 
we can't then while we may be no worse than our slan- 
derer was when he slandered us : we are harder, meaner, 
more unkind and cruel than he is now. He is now in 
Good Will ; and we are by our own fault out of it. He 
is in the Heaven of God's favor; Christ's grace; the 
Christian fellowship. We are in the hell of hard, un- 
forgiving hate. 

A dishonest promoter, with glowing prospectus, forged 
testimonials, false hopes of large dividends secures the 
hard earnings and savings of a lifetime: Uves luxu- 
riously on the salary he votes to himself or the profits 
he unjustly appropriates: and when the crash comes 
leaves us penniless in old age. Hundreds of such 
tragedies are happening every day. Ordinarily the 
swindler of this type is too remote, too impersonal, 
for his victims to know personally. But suppose we 



94 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

do know him; and know that he is truly sorry; not 
merely for the prison sentence he receives, but for the 
privation he has caused us. We probably should not 
feel called upon to invest any further savings in his 
enterprises. But if we are Christians we should will 
him no more harm than the protection of society against 
similar swindlers requires him to suffer. And as soon 
as that object is accomplished, if convinced of his 
penitence attested by works meet for repentance, we 
should favor his release on parole, or even his complete 
pardon. Otherwise in the sight of God, measured by 
our participation in Good Will, we are and shall be, 
if not worse than he was, worse than he is and means 
to be. 

An avaricious employer coins money out of the life- 
blood of our boy or girl ; and by compelling him or her 
to overwork in unsanitary surroundings, causes disease 
and premature death. Just for a few more dollars he 
murders our dear one. For, if not ours by birth, if we 
are in Good Will all boys and girls are ours by the 
adoption of sympathy. And tens of thousands of them 
are being slain every year by the avarice of greedy 
employers and murderous conditions of employment. 
When he sees and confesses the murder he has 
committed, repents, and abandons his miserly and 



RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 95 

murderous habits of employment, can we forgive him, 
and count him among those whom common devotion 
to Good Will makes friends ? If not, we are not Chris- 
tians. If we can, we have learned the lesson and re- 
produced the meaning of the cross of Christ. 

Some one has been inconsiderate, haughty, exclusive, 
supercilious to us, or to those we love ; causing bitter 
pain and grief. If he repents, can we overcome our 
resentment, and wish for him full measure of the happi- 
ness he has cruelly refused to give to us and ours ? The 
answer to that question will show whether in our social 
relations we are Christians, or mere heathen still. 

Another has been jealous of our standing, our talents, 
our wealth, and tried his best to pull us down. After- 
ward, seeing the injury he has done, he is sorry, and 
tries to make amends. Can we give him our favor, our 
influence, our support as heartily as if he had always 
rejoiced in our good fortune ? We can if we have Good 
Will, as Christ has it ; as hosts of our fellow Christians 
have it. 

Another has worried the life out of us by perpetual 
nagging, fault-finding, complaining and uncalled-for 
criticism. Seeing how weary and disheartened he has 
made us, he repents, and begins to try to see some good 
amid the obvious bad in us. Can we welcome him 



96 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

back to our friendship ? That will show whether Good 
Will is really in us, or our profession of Christianity is 
an empty form. ' 

A man has annoyed us by his intolerable conceit, 
until we can hardly endure the sight of him. He comes 
to see how silly and petty it all is, and is heartily ashamed 
of himseK. Are we as ready with our welcome to the 
new man as we were with our abomination of the old? 
We shall be, if we are Christians ; and share with Christ 
and all true Christians God's Good Will. 

A coward betrays us; a traitor gives away a cause 
for which we have labored long and hard. When they 
see the injury they have done they feel like Judas ready 
to go hang themselves. Are we wilKng, so far as justice 
to our cause permits, to take them back into our friend- 
ship and favor ? If Christ be in us, if we are with him 
in Good Will, we shall; if not, we shall not. 

Finally if a hypocrite, whom we have detested as 
utterly hollow-hearted and unreal, confesses and re- 
nounces the loathsome sin, can we give him another 
chance? This is perhaps the hardest test of all: for 
we can't help suspecting that his repentance is only one 
more pose ; and we don't like the idea of being fooled 
by him. If we do give him our confidence, our fellows 
will smile and call us ^'easy." Yet that is a risk Good 



RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 97 

Will calls US to run whenever not mere words but works 
meet for repentance are in evidence. It is better that 
we should be deceived in an honest attempt to forgive 
one who was and still is a hypocrite, than that we should 
refuse forgiveness to one who merely has been a hypo- 
crite ; is sorry for it ; and is resolved henceforth to be 
a sincere man. 

The forgiveness of sin is not something done once for 
all in ancient history, or eternal in the heavens; but 
it is something we all are called upon to do every day, 
and the spirit of which we need to have with us and in 
us all the time. To keep that spirit alive in himself 
and his people; to pronounce unchristian every man 
and every act whereby forgiveness and its appropri- 
ate expression are withheld, is one of the preacher's 
hardest tasks; and one which if successfully accom- 
pHshed is the clearest evidence of a successful and 
faithful ministry. For the man or community that 
has the forgiving spirit is in Good Will. While one 
who fails to forgive in this personal costly way is out 
of it altogether. 

The question will arise in the minds of those famil- 
iar with traditional views, What has the Cross of 
Christ to do with the forgiveness of sin? If God were 
a jealous, arbitrary being ; a stickler for his own offended 



98 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

dignity and the majesty of his law, we can see how the 
death of an innocent victim might be necessary to 
buy him off : just as beUevers in a personal devil (who 
by the way is not so very different from such a God) 
thought a ransom to him necessary. Undoubtedly in 
St. Paul's attempts by Rabbinical reasoning to explain 
Christ's death in terms of the Hebrew sacrificial system 
there are passages which lend themselves to such inter- 
pretation. If that is the way you think and feel about 
God, and Christ's sacrifice, undoubtedly you can sup- 
port it by ^^proof texts" from the Bible. On the other 
hand, if you think of God as the Fatherly Good Will to 
all his children: most tender to those who have gone 
farthest astray ; and most eager to welcome the prodi- 
gal's return (a view for which there are far more ^^ proof 
texts"), the idea that such Good Will to men needed 
any ransom or appeasement of wrath is monstrous and 
absurd. All forgiveness, as we have seen, involves 
sacrifice of merely individual feelings, and power to rise 
above them to a point of view high and large enough to 
include the offender's welfare. If Jesus had not been 
equal to that; if he had not stood ready to pay the 
full measure of such devotion to the real welfare of an 
evil and hostile world, he would not have revealed God's 
Good Will : he would have fallen below what the best 



RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 99 

Christian men and women have attained. In that deep 
and real sense Christ bore the burden of the world's 
iniquity : the chastisement of our peace was upon him : 
and with his stripes we are healed. He did in a typical 
historic situation, on a large world scale, what every 
one of his followers is repeatedly called upon to do : — 
he rose above his individual pleasure and preference to a 
universal devotion to the good of all whom his action 
could affect : and he paid with his Ufe the cost of such 
devotion. If Good Will were not thus self-sacrificing, 
self-transcending; if Christ had not revealed it in 
agony and blood; if countless Christian men and 
women did not share this sacrificial attitude and bear 
their portion of this cross, sin would be unforgiven 
and unforgivable; the sinner who had fallen would 
be irrevocably doomed; and his restoration to divine 
and human favor would be impossible. In that sense 
Christ had to suffer for our salvation: but in the 
same way every Christian has to suffer for the for- 
giveness and restoration of those who wrong him and 
those dear to him, and in wronging them wrong the 
world. Christ's cross is not unique but typical: Cal- 
vary is not local but cosmic : sacrifice is not temporal 
but eternal. The lamb was slain from the foundation 
of the world. Only he who dies to self can live to God's 



lOO THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

Good Will, and restore wrong-doers to their forfeited 
place in that Good Will. 

As the basis of forgiveness, sacrifice is necessary : not 
in an external, forensic, or merchandising sense ; but in 
the intimate, personal sense of including others, however 
undeserving they may have been, in the Good Will 
which one shares toward them with God. So under- 
stood, the preacher may and should freely use the suffer- 
ings of Christ as the strongest appeal to Christians to 
be forgiving ; and to wrong-doers to believe that God's 
Good Will forgives them the instant they repent. 

For Christ's sacrifice is so clear and compelling : so 
individual and so universal : so enshrined in literature 
and art, emotion and conception; that it reveals the 
forgiving Good Will of God a thousandfold more 
effectively than the fragmentary, scattered sacrifices of 
his followers ; obscured as these are by familiarity, im- 
perfection, and entanglement with sordid details. 

The preacher then will preach Christ and him crucified 
as the assurance of the forgiveness of sins. But it will 
be a cross borne in the heart of the Father as well as 
the Son : a cross of which each faithful and forgiving 
follower bears his part. 

Good Will, conditioned by the structure of the uni- 
verse and the freedom of man, seeks for each and all 



RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL lOl 

the greatest good these conditions permit. When a 
man does wrong, Good Will resists the wrong action in 
the interest of those who are wronged by it ; and also 
in the interest of the wrong-doer. For it is good for the 
transgressor to find his way made hard. When he turns 
from it and repents, Good Will instantly accepts him as 
potentially its servant. To go on identifying the wrong- 
doer with the wrong he has repudiated would be not 
only brutal but stupid. It is not merely contrary to 
Good Will; it is contradictory to the facts. The re- 
pentant wrong-doer is right : and if God did not recog- 
nize it he would be unreasonable : if recognizing it he 
did not forgive he would be unrighteous. Forgiveness 
is not a special favor, exceptional, gratuitous. When a 
wrong-doer has repented it is the only decent thing to do. 
A man who would not forgive another man who repented 
the wrong he had done him would be an inhuman brute. 
A God who would not forgive a man who repented the 
wrong he had done, would be a devil. Christ has re- 
vealed the reasonableness and righteousness of forgive- 
ness so clearly and beautifully that whoever falls below 
it ceases to be divine and human ; and becomes brutal 
and fiendish. 

The fact that so much of our theology presents a God 
who is reluctant to forgive, and forgives only by special 



I02 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

arrangement, shows how far we are from having incor- 
porated into it the disposition and insight of Jesus. As 
Jesus taught us, the fact that ^^we ourselves forgive 
every one that is indebted to us" (Luke xi. 4), is sure 
proof that a God who is not inferior to us cannot do less 
than forgive us our sins. Refusal or hesitation to do so 
is unmistakable evidence of the uneliminated brutality 
of the God or man who fails to forgive. 

Forgiveness is the most distinctive note Christ brought 
to the world ; and explains why he was so insistent on 
repentance. For until the wrong-doer repents it is 
neither rational nor righteous to forgive him. To for- 
give the unrepentant, or, in Mr. Osborne's words, to S3an- 
pathize with the criminal as criminal, is to enter into 
complicity with his wrong-doing. Only on the basis of 
stern condemnation for the deliberate and unrepentant 
wrong-doer is forgiveness consistent with moral and 
spiritual integrity. Cherished and unrepented sin, as 
we saw, shuts the sinner entirely out of fellowship with 
Good Will. That truth must be firmly held and un- 
compromisingly proclaimed. Then with equal confi- 
dence the complementary truth must be added : that 
not by special arrangement, or forensic dickering, but 
as the essential expression of the intrinsic nature of Good 
Will, each and every sin is forgiven, the worst wrong- 



RESTOEATION TO GOOD WILL I03 

doer is restored to the favor of God, of Christ, and of all 
Christian men, the instant he sincerely repents the 
wrong that he has done. As sure as sin shuts out the 
sinner ; so sure sincere penitence brings forgiveness and 
the welcome to the Father's house of the returning prod- 
igal. We are all prodigals: sacrificing over and over 
again, until seventy times seven, the greater and the 
greatest to the little and the less; but as often as we 
repent, even unto seventy times seven, we are assured 
of the forgiveness and fellowship of God, of Christ, and 
all men who have the Christian Spirit. This is the best 
part of the good news the preacher of the Gospel of 
Good Will is commissioned to preach. 

He has, however, more to do than merely to preach 
it. He must bring himself and his people to practice it. 
Forgiveness is kindness toward a person who has been 
doing something which we abhor. It is personal Good 
Will shining through intense disapproval. It is close 
and friendly contact with a person whose act and atti- 
tude we shrink from and antagonize. It is not natural, 
and therefore rare. When it occurs it is supernatural 
and indicates the presence in the heart of him who for- 
gives, of something superhuman, divine. That some- 
thing is Good Will in its most costly, sacrificial form. 

Who is the agent of forgiveness? In the deepest 



I04 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

sense, of course, God, and God alone, can forgive sins. 
That, however, is only another way of saying what was 
said above, that forgiveness is an act of supernatural, 
divine love. For God is Good Will ; and whatever can 
be done only in Good Will, is done in God and through 
God. 

In another sense, equally profound, Christ is the one 
through whom all sins are forgiven. For Christ is the 
historic representative, accepted as such by an ever in- 
creasing proportion of the race, of that self-sacrificing, 
outgoing love which holds dear and sacred every human 
soul, however depraved. Since Christ means that, and 
without that forgiveness is impossible, we rightly regard 
him as the Forgiver and Saviour of all who have sinned. 
There is no other door into the sheepfold. Other foun- 
dation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus 
Christ. 

All this, however, may be accepted either in a dry, 
dead, traditional sense, or in a fresh, vital, world-con- 
quering sense. Of late the church, for the most part, 
has accepted it in. the dry, dead, unfruitful sense. The 
church that takes it in this sense is doomed. The 
preachers that preach it are offering their diminishing 
congregations a gospel of mere words. 

The agents of God's forgiveness are individual Chris- 



RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 105 

tian men and women. The real church is the com- 
pany of those who have God's forgiving love in their 
hearts, and bestow it on their fellow men. Wherever 
one such soul forgives and loves another, however un- 
worthy that other be, there the kingdom of God comes 
and spreads. Whoever forgives others has the indis- 
pensable experience within him by which to interpret 
the reported and transmitted forgiveness of God in 
Jesus Christ. To those who lack that experience in 
themselves, or lack some human friend to act as its 
interpreter to them, forgiveness, however eloquently 
reported in book or sermon, remains a sealed message, 
an untranslated and untranslatable cipher. Forgive- 
ness is a personal relation, and requires for its full and 
adequate expression two parties, both human, sharing 
together the condemnation of whatever has been wrong 
in either; bearing toward each other mutual respect, 
and mutual affection. Until God's forgiveness is thus 
incarnated, until Christ's forgiveness is thus repro- 
duced in the specific situation where it is needed, toward 
the particular individual who has done the wrong, it 
remains something up in the clouds, back in ancient 
history. It is not a vital, flesh-and-blood reality, doing 
its redeeming, transforming work in the midst of breath- 
ing, erring, repenting men and women, in the homes, 



Io6 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

and factories, and farms, and stores, and offices, and 
prisons of the actual modern world. 

If we are to help save the world, we must not merely 
report forgiveness as a fact in eternity, or as an event in 
past time. We must not merely symbolize Christ's 
sacrificial love upon the altar, or announce it from the 
pulpit : we must act it out ; we must be the agents of it. 
For though it is true that one may learn of Christ's 
forgiveness from sermon or Bible, even then it is experi- 
ence of forgiveness by a human father, mother, teacher, 
or friend, which gives the hearer or reader the power 
to interpret in real terms the reported or recorded for- 
giveness of Christ. 

Real forgiveness, genuine salvation, requires that 
some one who has the love of Christ for men in his heart 
shall come close to the individual who has done wrong, 
touch him at the sensitive point of his particular wrong- 
doing with mingled kindness for him and condemnation 
for his sin, and win him to share with the one who loves 
him, and with God, their common condemnation of the 
wrong which he has done. Whoever makes such loving 
forgiveness the principle and spirit of his life, thereby 
enters and abides in the kingdom of God, and the body 
of Christ. Wherever one such soul forgives and loves 
another who has done wrong, there the kingdom of God 



RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 107 

comes, there the church of Christ extends and spreads. 
All who have that experience, have the experience 
wherewith to assure themselves that the reported for- 
giveness of God in Jesus Christ includes and applies 
to them; and to all whom, with the insight of love, 
they lovingly forgive. 



IV 

GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE 

"All business should be done so that the advantage is distrib- 
uted. Business success should mean much more than the enrich- 
ment of an individual. It should mean that the community is 
enriched." William H. Baldwin, Jr., in An American Citizen 
by John Graham Brooks, pp. 282-283. 

These are the words of a brilliantly successful rail- 
road president. Our lesson will be a series of brief 
selections from his biography, showing the attitude 
towards business this successful railroad president main- 
tained. Before describing this attitude as an ideal for 
all vocations it is well for us to recognize that in one 
man at least, in the most intricate and delicate of all 
vocations, that of railroading, this attitude, here in the 
United States in the twentieth century, has been a fact, 
and a successful fact. 

"There was never a moment when, in the deeper, wider 
currents of his mind, he was not moved by impulses 
greater than the acquisition of wealth : never a moment 

108 



GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE 109 

when this was not a secondary and subordinate object 
of his energies.'* 

'^He early learned that interests between the manage- 
ment and the laborer are one and the same only as both 
sides try to make them the same. This harmony does 
not come of itself, nor is it to be taken for granted. All 
the truth it holds has to be created by honorable pur- 
pose and Good Will." 

^^He came to think of the railroad as having one final 
justification, — namely, the development of business in 
the communities through which it passed. It was there 
to make life easier to the farmer. It was there to cheapen 
products to the consumer. It was there to assist in the 
distribution of congested city populations." 

'^His whole idea of the railroad was to develop it in 
the interest of everybody along the route. Its pros- 
perity was to be the common prosperity. Baldwin not 
only held that as a theory, but he acted upon it practi- 
cally." 

"With stubborn valor he took the position that all 
business necessary to he done, can be done without base- 
ness. It can be done without low trickeries and with- 
out organizing injury against one's fellow men." 

"Among his best and surest gifts was that rare power 
of putting himself so vividly in the place of another, as 



no THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

to enlarge and humanize his observation. He was 
always helped by asking, 'What should I think and 
do, if I were actually in that man's place?'" 

''Our transportation system is our largest machine 
and also our most important. It is so important that 
the motive in its management should be elevated and 
broadened. It should be first a social motive and not 
a personal one. He insisted that the propaganda for 
teaching this social motive to the people could not begin 
an hour too soon." 

" In the spirit of fair play, he asks the simplest ques- 
tion: If these bilKons of capital have to be organized 
in order to protect themselves against disrupting rival- 
ries, do not the laborers working for these organizations 
have the same need of combination? Do they not need 
it for the same reason ? Is capital exposed to cut- throat 
competition in any greater degree than labor is exposed 
to it? How can capital have the face to ask for com- 
bination, in order to free itself from a murderous compe- 
tition, when labor suffers every bit as much from the 
same cause? An encouraged immigration of unskilled 
foreigners subjects the common workman in this country 
to the most relentless pressure, and yet he is to be de- 
prived of the very instruments of self-protection which 
capital claims and is strong enough to get." 



\ 



GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS I SERVICE III 

'^I need, as an employer, an organization among my 
employees, because they know their needs better than 
I can know them, and they are therefore the safeguard 
upon which I must depend in order to prevent me from 
doing them an injustice." 

^^The function performed by railroads has become 
too important to the body politic to permit of any solu- 
tion of these serious labor and wage questions, except 
by intelHgent consideration on the part of the representa- 
tives both of the management and of the employees." 

"Collective bargaining and voluntary arbitration 
are possible only when the employer recognizes the right 
of the employed to have a voice in the fixing of wages 
and conditions of employment. The recognition of 
committees of employees is absolutely essential and is 
judged to be inevitable." 

-^ "His rehgion of Good Will is a religion which required 
in his case Uttle ritual or institutional expression. He 
lives it quite as much on Monday as on Sunday. He 
lives it in his office and on the train. He lives it in the 
turmoil of a strike and in the treatment of his subordi- 
nates. He lives it with the negro, for whom he asked 
justice as he asked it for the trade-union. It is this 
religion which gave him the pity and tolerance for the 
prostitute even while enforcing the law against her." 



112 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

^'His assertion that the private dividends should not 
be first, but strictly subordinated to the common wel- 
fare, is an unflinching ethical proposal. There is no 
better definition of social morality than conscious sub- 
mission of our action to the good of the community. 
To make the common weal the controlling test of cor- 
porate action would moralize business as it would moral- 
ize politics. It would revolutionize our wealth-making 
more profoundly than most socialist schemes now in 
vogue. This principle of using corporate power first 
for public ends, was not with Baldwin a mood of phrase- 
making. It had to him a clear-cut meaning on which 
he was willing to act." 

'^Baldwin did not vapor about ideals or force them 
upon unwilling ears. There never was in him a taint of 
the ^holier-than-thou' attitude, yet he was an idealist 
in its strict and proper sense — a mind moved by ideas. 
What haunts him and even drives him is a moral im- 
agery of something better. The propelling idea in his 
case is moral because it consciously includes the good of 
other people. If the mental picture is that of his rail- 
road, he conceives of it in relation to public welfare. 
The railroad must be more and more efiicient in a ser- 
vice that includes everybody. He does not think of it 
merely as a machine out of which a few private pockets 



{ 



GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE II 3 

are to be filled. Its one justification is that it helps 
toward a development in which all men share." 

*'It was never for a moment his purpose to make all 
the money he could possibly acquire. With moral 
deliberation, he set limits to his own acquisition. He 
would make money, but he would make it with condi- 
tions. He would neither be a parasite nor a gambler. 
Upon principle, he would grow rich more slowly if there 
were any question of straight and honorable methods. 
In a case of proposed railroad extension, he was asked, 
as an ojB&cial, to take advantage of plans then secret 
and buy certain properties. He considered it, but re- 
fused. ^I could have made a pot of money out of that,' 
he said, ^but I should have sold too much of myself.' " 

With this twentieth-century, American fact as text 
and lesson, we may now apply this ^^ religion of Good 
Will" to other representative vocations. 

To transform into expressions of itself all secular 
vocations is the practical aim of Good Will ; and there- 
fore the objective at which the preacher by words and 
the layman by works must aim. We must see in sharp, 
clear contrast the difference between the man who is 
and who is not enlisted in the service of Good Will, as 
that difference comes out in the secular vocations. 

Stated in general terms that difference is that the self- 



114 THE GOSPEL OE GOOD WILL 

ish man does not consider, and the servant of Good Will 
does consider, the consequences of his action to all 
who are affected by it precisely as if he bore those conse- 
quences in his own person. Let us then run through 
a representative list of vocations, putting the natural 
man who serves his own will first, and the Christian 
man who serves Good Will second in each case. That 
will show what the preacher has to preach, and the 
layman has to practice, to make the world the Kingdom 
of Good Will and of Christ as its historic champion. 

The natural man, as worker, thinks first of his pay ; 
and secondly of doing his work well enough to hold his 
job and continue to draw his pay. The man who has 
heard and obeyed the call of Good Will thinks first 
of his work and the substantial benefits it will confer 
on the consumer of its product ; does it heartily with his 
eye on the good it is doing ; and takes his pay gratefully 
as more or less of an equivalent given him in return 
for the service he has rendered. The natural man 
therefore does his work slavishly and grudgingly: the 
disciple of Good Will does it freely and gladly; giving 
full measure, whether the measure of pay is quite full 
or not. 

The natural man, as player of any game plays to win, 
by fair means or foul. The man of Good Will in every 



GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE II 5 

game virtually offers the prayer, *^Fair play; and may 
the best man win." He would rather be beaten fairly 
than win unfairly: and when the better man wins 
will be as glad for him, and as appreciative of his skill 
and prowess, as though those superior qualities had 
been his own. The boy who can do his best and still 
be glad to jBnd in another a better than his best, has 
gone a long way on the Christian road : and the preacher 
who can enter his young people on that arduous race 
is doing his part as coach of their spiritual athletics. 
Pluck, training, courage, perseverance, and also courtesy, 
honor, chivalry, magnanimity, must mark the spiritual 
athlete who will win the prize of Christlike character 
offered by Good Will. 

The natural employer of labor, the employer who 
recognizes no will but the will of his own interest, will 
pay as little wages, and provide as inexpensive condi- 
tions of life and labor as possible ; and let his relations 
to his employees end then and there. It is the preach- 
er's duty to make every such employer chronically un- 
comfortable. He will make the cold-blooded, hard- 
hearted grinder of the faces of his employees realize 
that not to make his relationship to his employees 
an expression of Good Will, is to be himself out of that 
Will altogether. Bits of it he may pick up in his home. 



Il6 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

his club, his associations with other employers. But 
in the full comprehensive fellowship of Good Will no 
employer of labor can be, who fails to make the welfare 
of his employees the constant object of his will. 

On the contrary the employer who is himself in the 
employ of Good Will aims to make his employees 
participants in the financial profit; the social spirit; 
the good name and good order, which binds employer 
and employees together in mutual loyalty and devotion. 
Precisely how this is to be done or how far it should 
be carried, through profit-sharing, arbitration, welfare 
work, social centers, athletic teams, the preacher may 
not be enough of an accountant, a business man, or 
a sociologist, to point out in detail. Unless he is an 
expert he will do best to leave these details to the em- 
ployer to work out in his own way. His business is 
to make sure that the employer, if he thinks of him- 
self as a Christian, shall as an essential part of that 
thought think of his employees as partners, brothers, 
helpers, friends, whose interests are included in the 
interest he takes in his business as a whole. 

The Christian employee, in proportion to the number 
in his class, is rarer than the Christian employer. The 
natural man as employee does as little as he can : feels 
no responsibility for use of time, care of tools and plant, 



GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE II 7 

economy of materials, or soundness of product. He 
regards his employer as his natural enemy; and too 
often values his union chiefly as a means of fighting 
him. 

The Christian employee, the employee who lives in 
Good Will, makes his employer's interest his own; 
whether this interest is reciprocated or not ; even if the 
employer be a big and perhaps corruptly managed 
impersonal corporation. He will give it his best work, 
his best thought, his best care; whatever he gets in 
return. If he joins a union and fights for and by col- 
lective bargaining, as he has a perfect right to, he will 
be careful to do no injury beyond what may be neces- 
sary to make his employer realize his rights and treat 
him as a fellow-man. With malice toward none, with 
charity for all employers, the Christian employee will 
do his best work as long as he works at all ; and when 
he strikes it will be under the stern necessity of a last 
resort in the interest of justice ; not as a welcome chance 
to show his animosity. 

This Gospel of Good Will, when preached to work- 
ing-men and their unions, will not always be a welcome 
one. But the preacher must be as plain with the em- 
ployee as with the employer ; hold up as high and hard 
a service of Good Will before the one class as before the 



Il8 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

other. The Christian solution of the labor problem is 
not as simple, as easy, as congenial to the heart of 
the selfish man as many of the panaceas offered appear 
to be. But if once generally applied it can be guar- 
anteed to work : and not only solve the problem, but 
make heroes of those who do their part in its solution. 

The selfish man as merchant aims to make as much as 
he can out of his customers and still retain their trade 
against competitors. If cheap goods will bring larger 
profits and more frequent sales than substantial goods, 
cheap goods he will sell. If worthless or deleterious 
goods, like most patent medicines, yield the largest 
margin of profit, and develop a habit which it requires 
repeated purchasing to satisfy, those he will advertise 
and urge his customers to buy. The customer in every 
transaction is regarded, not as a man to be served to the 
best of the merchant's ability for a fair return ; but as 
a profit-producer to be exploited. "Let the buyer 
look out for himself, it is no business of mine to look 
out for him," is the heartless motto. It is the preacher's 
duty to show that merchant that he is nothing more 
nor less than a legalized pirate, preying on the neces- 
sities of his fellow-men. The preacher very likely 
does not know enough about merchandising to tell 
the merchant just how much profit he should charge 



GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE II9 

when virtual monopoly gives him the chance to charge 
what he pleases. But if he is fit to be a preacher, he 
does know what the spirit and attitude of a merchant 
toward his customer ought to be ; and he will not allow 
that merchant to be comfortable in his own mind, or 
well esteemed by others, unless the goods he sells, the 
prices he charges, are determined not alone by the pres- 
ence or absence of effective competition; but by a 
genuine desire to serve the customer by giving him at 
a price fairly representing the value of his skill, his risk, 
his capital, his labor, the commodity that customer 
desires. That is what it means to preach Good Will 
to a merchant. On no lower terms has the preacher 
the right to assure the merchant that he is filhng his 
place and performing his function as Good Will requires. 
The professional man takes as his province some line 
of service, Law, Medicine, Religion, which involves 
for its thorough comprehension a prolonged training, 
and a developed insight which the laity as a rule cannot 
attain. They consequently are entirely at his mercy; 
absolutely dependent on his skill, integrity and honor 
for the soundness and worth of what he gives them in 
professional service and advice. Hence the professional 
man must be one of two things : either a free and con- 
scious servant of Good Will as it applies to the cases 



I20 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

with which he professionally deals ; or else a downright 
charlatan, palming off under the protection of his pro- 
fessional authority not merely worthless but positively 
deleterious substances or services. The temptation to 
be a charlatan is at times very strong. It is cheap : it 
is profitable : and in individual cases it appears easy to 
escape detection. The lawyer, physician or minister 
who has not felt at some time or other the tempta- 
tion to substitute the cheap guess for the costly 
certainty, the easy evasion for the expensive solution 
of a hard problem, is probably rare. Good Will in the 
Christian professional man involves bringing to bear 
on each specific case the fruits of the world's best science 
and skill as it applies to that case: the resolute re- 
fusal to offer anything less than the best one is capable 
of acquiring and using. The Christian professional 
man is thus the representative of Good Will in some 
specific sphere not easily accessible to the layman : and 
he is bound to make the interest of patient, client or 
parishioner his own; yes more than his own: he is 
bound to place it above personal profit, convenience, 
reputation, or in critical cases his own health and life. 
As the professed representative of a single difficult 
phase of Good Will, he must see that that Will is done, 
whatever the cost to himself. The Gospel is not fully 



GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE 121 

and faithfully preached until every professional man in 
the community is taught to measure himself by the 
high standard of doing disinterestedly and devotedly 
all that Good Will requires of the man who represents 
it in one of its more arduous and technical forms. 

The scientist likewise is tempted to accept hearsay 
and tradition for first-hand truth. The former is easy, 
cheap and respectable: the latter is hard, expensive 
and often at first unpopular. Formerly this duty of 
truthfulness on the part of the scientist was not ade- 
quately recognized; and the easy repetition of tradi- 
tion, the cheap adoption of respectable error, was 
thought to savor of orthodoxy. Our generation has 
learned the lesson that Good Will is at the same time, 
/ especially for the man who assumes to be an expert, 
V the will to truth ; though there are sections of the world, 
and branches of the church, where Good Will is still 
— ' confounded with the will to lie ; if the lie only be in the 
interest of ecclesiastical tradition. Against all that 
the preacher must set his face : he must put truth, 
however unpopular, however unsettling, however ap- 
parently dangerous, above orthodoxy, above safety, 
above immediate comfortableness. For Good Will 
cannot permanently be promoted by falsehood; and 
all the immediate good that temporarily seems to be 



122 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

gained by pious fraud has to be paid for when ultimately 
the truth comes out, as it surely will. The blame for 
the disillusion and doubt the truth brings attaches not 
to the men who bring the truth, but to the men who 
clung so long to error — and taught others to cling to it. 
The preacher must rid himself of beliefs which he 
holds at second hand; and profess to believe only the 
things which he sees with clearness and holds in sin- 
cerity. Any make-believe in his own thinking will 
betray itself in a tone of unconscious insincerity when 
he attempts to influence others. It would be easy to 
name whole ecclesiastical communions whose clerical 
utterances on certain subjects carry to the candid no 
conviction whatever ; simply because we feel sure that 
they have never dared to be frankly candid and sincere 
with themselves. On the contrary the preacher who is 
the conscious servant of Good Will, becomes so fearless 
in his rejection of falsehood, so single-minded toward 
the truth, so transparently honest in his distinction 
between what he is sure of, and what he is uncertain 
about, that all who hear him catch the holy contagion 
of transparent truthfulness. 
. Special pleading or elaborate argument in the pulpit 
{ seldom convinces anybody : but the confident assertion 
-^ of a man who is transparently sincere with himself, 



GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE 1 23 

carries weight with all who see and feel his sincerity. 
Historical and metaphysical matters may be doubtful: 
but there are plenty of moral and spiritual truths to 
which the sincere preacher can bear convincing testi- 
mony. The preacher who lives in Good Will will 
never be tempted to the impossible task of trying to 
convince his people of something of which he himself 
is doubtful. On the other hand mere truthfulness is 
only one special section of the total sweep of Good Will. ) 
It would be easy to name one or two denominations which 
have so prided themselves on their intellectual sincerity 
that they have lost the perspective of other phases of 
Good Will, like charity, modesty, sympathy. Truth- 
fulness for the scientist is vital : and if he fails in that 
point, he fails totally. But for the ordinary man, truth- 
fulness is merely one of a hundred ways in which Good 
Will seeks and finds expression. 

The teacher's temptation is not so much to falsehood ; 
* — as to indifference; to the half doing of his work; to 
thinking that because he has ^^got off" something in 
the presence of the learner, therefore the learner has 
learned: whereas the getting off of truth is only the 
easy end of teaching: the real test being whether the 
truth is brought home to the minds of the pupils, and 
there appropriated and sjonpathetically shared. To 



124 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

shirk this harder task is the great temptation of the 
teacher; one into which a teacher without conscious 
Good Will is pretty sure to fall. 

The teacher then must be taught to see teaching as 
an opportunity to put truth so clearly, convincingly, 
pictorially, appreciatively, sympathetically that the 
pupils will assimilate and organize it into the structure of 
their minds, and embrace it with the affection of their 
hearts. The preacher must know and feel, and make 
teachers know and feel, the infinite difference between 
a teacher who teaches a lesson and is done with it 
when it is off his mind, and a teacher who lives imagi- 
natively and sympathetically in the minds of his pupils ; 
and prepares, presents, reviews and examines with a 
view to the effective assimilation and organization of 
truth in the minds of the pupils. Only the latter 
teachers enter and abide through their vocation in Good 
Will. Educational officials, like presidents, principals 
and superintendents, if they know their business, will 
refuse to have on their staff of teachers any men or 
women who are not Christians in the sense of being the 
sympathetic servants of their pupils. 

Wealth, the product of past and the control over 
future labor, can either be a curse or a blessing to its 
possessor and to the world. Gained unscrupulously; 



GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE 1 25 

held greedily ; invested recklessly ; wielded mercilessly ; 
spent ostentatiously; given away promiscuously; it 
has untold power to harden, and hurt, and degrade. To 
do these things is natural and the line of least resistance 
for the capitalist. If he does these things it is the 
preacher's duty to denounce him as the enemy of Good 
Will. On the other hand gained, invested, saved, spent, 
given in such ways and such proportions as Good Will 
demands, capital becomes a mighty benefit and the 
capitalist a mighty benefactor. 

The preacher may not be enough of an economist 
and financier to tell the capitaUst in detail precisely how 
to avoid the curse and win the blessing that the posses- 
sion and use of capital involves. But he must be an 
expert in the right attitude of the capitalist toward it. 
He must help his wealthy men to offer their wealth 
conscientiously, wisely, disinterestedly to the service of 
Good Will. He must help them to make sure that the 
proportion of their wealth they invest in productive in- 
dustry will do more good so invested, than it would if 
invested in other forms of production ; or if given, or 
spent on himself and his family. The rich man must be 
sure that the amount of money spent on himself and his 
family will do more good so spent than it would if invested 
or given. He must be sure that the money he gives 



126 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

tends to do more good so given than it would if given in 
other directions, or invested, or spent. This is a hard 
task ; and with or without help in detail from the preacher 
the rich man is pretty sure to make a great many mis- 
takes. But it is the rich man's duty to make this effort ; 
and the preacher's duty to keep him aware that only 
through such a devotion of every cent he has to the most 
effective service of Good Will can he win the blessing and 
escape the curse of riches. It is the preacher's task to 
point out this very narrow way to every rich man in his 
congregation ; and to assure him that while to unregen- 
erated human nature such a disinterested distribution 
of one's resources is impossible, it is, at least in intent 
and aim, not only possible but imperative for all who 
have Good Will. Giving is hard to the man whose 
will is merely the resultant of his natural desires. Why 
should he give ^^away" — away from himself — what 
he so laboriously has won? And if he does give, there 
is sure to be some self-centred motive behind it; "to 
be seen of men" ; or to get rid of anno5dng importunity. 
Good Will once made the object of the individual will 
' identifies the giver with the person or cause he seeks 
to help. If being seen to give will incite others to give 
too, he will let the hght of his giving shine: not for 
his own individual glory, but that Good Will may be 



GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE 1 27 

glorified and better accomplished through other generous 
hearts. But if no such good is to come from pubHcity, 
the giver who gives in Good Will will prefer not to let 
his left hand know what his right hand doeth. He will 
be so intent on Good Will; so identified with its aims, 
that personal mention in connection with it would be 
unwelcome, because distracting attention from the gift 
and its aim to the giver and his merits — a very minor 
consideration in the mind of any man who has Good 
Will at heart. 

There is hardly a better test of one's progress in Good 
Will than this — whether one wishes to be known in the 
matter other than as such knowledge strengthens Good 
( Will in others : or whether one regards his gift, and the 
good it may do, as a means to his own popularity and 
reputation. How far short of giving from Good Will 
most of us fall may be seen in the difference in size 
between an anonymous gift to the contribution box, 
and the public subscription we would make to the same 
cause. 

Shall the Christian fight? He prefers peace. He 
will not fight for aggression or gain. Yet rather than 
let tyranny oppress the weak, arrogance break down civ- 
ilization, lust ravish the defenceless, greed exploit the 
poor, hypocrisy block the way to Heaven, the man who 



128 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

is animated by Good Will will fight with the army and 
navy, with the police and the courts; and on the un- 
civilized frontier with his revolver and his own right 
arm. Yet he will do it without maUce; with sorrow 
that he has to; with forgiveness at the first sign of 
penitence; with outstretched hands of helpfulness 
the instant the vanquished surrender. As long as the 
motive of the fighting is not the enemy's harm as such ; 
but the repression of the injustice he is seeking to com- 
mit ; fighting is not merely consistent with, it becomes 
expressive of Good Will, which is the essence of Chris- 
tianity. Incidental injury to our enemy, if it is merely 
incidental to doing good or repressing evil, because it 
is not made the prime object at which the will aims, does 
not vitiate the will. Whoever inflicts injury sincerely 
/ regretting the necessity of doing so, because Good Will 
j requires it, becomes therein the true Christian soldier. 
The writer who writes whatever comes into his head, 
regardless of its effect on the reader, is unchristian. He 
wields the mighty power of the pen to the wanton injury 
of multitudes of readers. Some incidental injury to 
the immature and the unprepared, if accepted as a 
regretted necessity, as a means to greater goods on 
the whole, is, like injury inflicted regretfully in war, 
consistent with and expressive of Good Will and there- 



GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS I SERVICE 1 29 

fore Christian. But harm intentionally done for fame 
or gain, in indifference or self-conceit, marks a writer 
as anti-Christian — the enemy of Good Will. 

The artist in sculpture, painting or drama is subject 
to the same test as the writer. Harm done incidentally 
with reluctance as an unavoidable means to a greater 
desirable benefit on the whole is not only permissible 
but laudable. Great art, like nature, is bound to harm 
some who are not prepared to receive it worthily. But 
no artist can positively will that harm, or fail to deplore 
it, without coming under the condemnation of Good 
Will, and forfeiting the fellowship of those who share 
and serve it. Beauty is a large element in that good 
which is the end and aim of Good Will : but unless the 
good in the beauty of an artistic creation is clearly greater 
to those who behold it worthily than the harm to those 
who behold it unworthily, the work of art and the artist 
who creates and exhibits it is an enemy of Good Will. 
For while good and beauty to a great extent coincide, 
good is the more inclusive term; and therefore ulti- 
mately beauty must be weighed in terms of good. A 
work of art which has as its foreseen and deliberately 
accepted chief result the stimulation of lust, however 
beautiful, is an unchristian product; and excludes 
the artist who creates it from the fellowship of Good 



130 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

Will. If this be Puritanism it is a Puritanism that is 
as old and noble as Plato and Aristotle and Jesus. 
Beauty is a precious thing; but ojffending beauty is 
condemned by all who have Good Will. 

Taxpaying is a rather searching test of the extent 
to which one has become identified with Good Will. 
The man who is living in his own will as supreme 
will hate his taxes ; dodge them ; make private deals 
with the assessors. Between him and the public wel- 
fare which his taxes are to support and serve there 
is a great gulf fixed, deep and wide as the gulf be- 
tween hell and heaven — indeed, profoundly appre- 
hended it is that very gulf, — and the natural will, 
unless it gets across on some such shaky bridge as 
regard for reputation, or fear of J&ne and imprisonment, 
cannot cross it. 

Good Will spans that gulf — or rather for it the gulf 
does not exist : the interests of the public and the inter- 
ests of the man who has been born again into Good Will 
become identical; and the bearing of his fair share of 
the pubKc burdens is to such a man a positive dehght. 
He takes just as much satisfaction in the payment of 
his full taxes as he does in buying beef steak for his 
family or a suit of clothes for himself. He is big enough 
to make the taxes, and the services they perform. 



GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE 131 

just as much objects of his will, as the clothes on his 
back or the food on his table. 

The ofl&ce-holder whose will is the resultant of his own 
personal interests will be inefi&cient, corrupt and corrupt- 
ing. It takes a will as large and generous as Good Will 
to make a man in ofl&ce treat that office as a trust to be 
executed as faithfully, as disinterestedly, as devotedly 
as he would attend to his private affairs. Good Will 
in ofl&ce as the Will to make the interests of the state 
or country one's own will be a frequent theme with the 
true preacher. 

Even the reformer, if he be not in his reform as a 
service to Good Will, finds himself caring more for his 
own prominence than for the success of his cause. When 
the men who are satisfied with, and are profiting by, 
the abuses he attacks, turn upon him and revile him 
and persecute him, he will weaken, compromise, ^4et 
up." One who would carry through to a successful 
issue any great reform must be patient, persistent, 
brave, magnanimous, good-natured, disinterested; and 
these qualities come and stay with a man only in so far 
as he makes Good Will his principle of action. The 
preacher may not always be able to say in detail what 
reforms are wise and timely and what are visionary and 
impracticable: but he ought to be an authoritative 



132 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

expert on the motives on which every reformer should 
prosecute his reforms; and the interpreter of Good 
Will as it applies to the reformer's personal attitude and 
temper. 

These are by no means all the specific vocations and 
relations in which a man stands ; but they are enough 
to make clear the vital and eternal difference between 
a man who lives his life and does his work from himself, 
by himself, and for himself, and the man who, wherever 
he touches the world, and his fellows, tries to make his 
conduct expressive of Good Will. 

To keep that contrast clear before the minds, warm 
within the hearts, of his people is ever the preacher's 
mighty duty, and the layman's stupendous task. In 
that contrast as it works out in detail, the richness and 
variety of which has been only suggested, are to be 
found the stuff for scores of sermons. No preacher who 
thinks out in detail that eternal difference will ever 
lack for vital themes on which to preach. 

If we summarize even the few specimen vocations we 
have considered the result will make the fundamental 
issue clear, and show the Gospel of Good Will in some- 
thing of its splendid transforming and transfiguring 
power. 

Who then in his vocation is the Christian? He is 



GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS : SERVICE 133 

Whoever as worker puts the thought of the enjojonent 
of the consumer alongside the thought of his pay : 

Whoever as player wants the best man to win : 

Whoever as employer ranks the wages and health of 
his workmen on a level with profits and dividends : 

Whoever as employee keeps his employer's interest as 
clearly in mind as his own, and as warmly at heart as 
his union's : 

Whoever as merchant by good wares at fair prices 
brings producer and consumer together : 

Whoever as professional man rates the character, 
health, prosperity, of parishioners, patients, clients 
above popularity, station or fee : 

Whoever as scientist prizes truth above fame or gain : 

Whoever as teacher enjoys the mental growth of his 
students more than the spread of his own reputation : 

Whoever as owner treats his wealth as a liability to 
be invested, spent and given in such proportions as on 
the whole will do most good : 

Whoever as giver helps the recipients to become in 
turn also givers : 

Whoever as fighter maintains good will toward his 
enemies on all points save the few on which he believes 
them to be wrong : 

Whoever as writer makes his readers love good and 
hate evil : 



134' THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

Whoever as artist sets things as they are in the fair 
light of things as they should be : 

Whoever as taxpayer takes positive pleasure in 
bearing his full, fair share of community burdens : 

Whoever as citizen votes to his private injury when 
private and public advantage conflict : 

Whoever as office-holder rates efiiciency and service 
above honors and emoluments: 

Whoever as reformer wins the hate of men who know 
him for the sake of men whom he never will know : 

Whoever as man, wherever he touches the world, 
makes his fellow-men and himself equal objects of Good 
WiU. 



THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 

" She will have left an inspiring example to posterity. She has 
lost everything, but she has saved her own soul, and she has 
saved the Hberties of Europe." Charles Sarolea, How Belgium 
Saved Europe, p. 194. 

The lesson from which the text is taken is too long 
and detailed to quote at length. I vdll summarize the 
substance of it : giving in the author's own words only 
the conclusion. 

Of sacrifice on a large and conspicuous scale there is 
no more shining modern example than the action of 
Belgium at the outbreak of the great war, as it is set 
forth by Sarolea in his "How Belgium Saved Europe." 
Territorially the smallest nation of Europe ; half Flem- 
ish, half Walloon; half plain, half mountain; half 
agricultural, half manufacturing; half CathoHc, half 
agnostic; neutral and protected in its neutrahty by 
treaty; this nation so recently ruled by the execrable 
Leopold II, this little peace-loving nation, was given 

135 



136 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

the twelve hours of night between seven in the evening 
and seven in the morning to make the most momentous 
decision in all her history. On the one side was the 
promise, if the word of a treaty-breaking, consciously 
wrong-doing nation can be called a promise, of the 
integrity of the Belgian kingdom, prompt evacuation 
of her territory and indemnification for damage. On 
this side was physical life, material comfort and unin- 
terrupted prosperity. On the other side was the horror 
of an unequal war ; the devastation of her country by 
a pohcy of studied and systematic frightfulness ; death 
for thousands of her sons ; poverty, starvation, or exile 
for milHons of her citizens. Yet rather than sacrifice 
nationaUty to the risk of absorption by an aggressive, 
hateful and domineering autocracy; rather than sacri- 
fice treaty rights and the civilization that rests upon 
them to the ambitions of treaty-breaking mihtarism, 
Belgium, single-handed and unsupported through those 
terrible days of August, 1914, cheerfully, unitedly, 
patriotically, reUgiously sacrificed the material to the 
spiritual; the individual to the social; the national 
to the international; and gave her little but essential 
contribution to the cause of humanity and liberty, 
democracy and essential Christianity, in the hour of 
its greatest danger. Belgium has suffered the loss of 



THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 137 

all things — all save her soul. But, in consequence of 
her sacrifice, there is still hope for the cause of national 
Hberty and international honor ; there is still hope for 
a peace too strong in the alliance of federated nations 
for any one nation however autocratic and miKtaristic 
and perverse to break ; and there is the certainty that 
Httle Belgium has risen to rank with Palestine and 
Greece among the nations whose heroism has helped to 
save the world, advance the cause of civilization, and 
reveal anew the Godlike capacities of our common 
human nature. 

Now that the tremendous sacrifice in blood and treas- 
ure, in the comforts of home and the shrines of art and 
reHgion has been made, we can all see that through this 
sacrifice Belgium has won a far more exceeding and 
eternal weight of glory than could have come through a 
thousand years of ease-loving self-indulgence. As Mr. 
Sarolea says : — 

"In order to understand the dogged resistance of the 
Belgians we must appeal to the deepest instincts of 
man, to the elemental impulses of liberty, and perhaps 
still more must we appeal to the higher motives of out- 
raged justice, to the moral consciousness of right and 
wrong. Until we take in the fact that from the begin- 
ning the struggle was hfted to a higher plane, we shall 



138 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

fail to understand the true significance of the war. 
From the beginning the war was to the Belgian people 
much more than a national war: it became a Holy 
War. And the expression ^Holy' War must be under- 
stood not as a mere literary phrase, but in its literal and 
exact definition. The Belgian war was a crusade of 
Civilization against Barbarism, of eternal right against 
brute force.'' 

'^So true is this that in order adequately and clearly 
to reaKze the Belgian attitude, we are compelled to 
illustrate our meaning by adducing one of the most 
mysterious conceptions of our Christian religion, the 
notion of vicarious suffering. In theological language, 
Belgium suffered vicariously for the sake of Europe. 
She bore the brunt of the struggle. She was left over 
to the tender mercies of the invaders. She allowed 
herself to become a battlefield in order that France 
might be free from becoming a shambles. She had to 
have her beautiful capital violated in order that the 
French capitol might remain inviolate. She had to 
submit to vandalism in order that humanity elsewhere 
might be vindicated. Belgium will have lost every- 
thing. The material damage, the destruction of thou- 
sands of cities and villages, the total collapse of industry 
and trade are incalculable. The damage to the monu- 



THE COST OF GOOD WILL : SACRIFICE 139 

ments, sacred to art and reKgion, is not only incalcu- 
lable but irreparable. The sufferings inflicted upon 
millions of people baflSe imagination, but the moral and 
spiritual gain is equally inestimable. Belgium will 
have proved to all the world her determination and her 
right to exist as a free nation. She will have earned 
the sympathy and admiration of the whole world. She 
will have left an inspiring example to posterity. She 
has lost everything, but she has saved her own soul; 
and she has saved the Hberties of Europe." 

If newspaper correspondents and secular writers 
rise to the heights of such a spiritual interpretation of 
current events, the Christian preacher cannot afford 
to preach sacrifice as merely an exceptional ancient 
transaction : he must measure the Kfe of men and na- 
tions to-day by the same high standard, and proclaim 
an ever deepening and widening sacrifice. 

The principle of sacrifice is as fundamental and uni- 
versal as the laws of arithmetic. It is inherent in the 
very nature of choice: which cannot take one of two 
or more alternatives without sacrificing the others. 
We have already seen that sin is the sacrifice of the 
greater to the lesser good ; and that service involves the 
sacrifice of the lesser to the greater good. In every 
specific form of service there is latent or expKcit the 



I40 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

sacrifice of some minor competing goods. Under the 
names of temperance — the cutting off of competing 
pleasure, and courage — the taking on of incidental pain, 
the Greeks taught the same lesson. Without sacrifice 
it is impossible to choose : impossible to take a single 
step in moral and spiritual living. 

Yet fundamental and universal as sacrifice is in the 
spiritual hfe, it should never be presented as an end in 
itself, nor carried beyond the Kmits set by Good Will. 
For Good Will cares for us no less than for those we serve ; 
and sacrifice beyond the point reasonable and efficient 
service requires is sour and silly asceticism. Hence 
preaching and practice should always emphasize, not 
the lesser good foregone, but the greater good achieved. 
Still sacrifice is so essential to the service of Good Will, 
and so Kkely to be either underdone or overdone, that 
its universal necessity and its reasonable limits will be 
the frequent theme of the preacher. And we shall get a 
concrete and vital, as distinct from abstract and theoret- 
ical insight into the laws and the Kmits of sacrifice if at 
the outset we follow, even at the risk of partial repeti- 
tion, some of the same relations as in the previous chapter 
on service : drawing out in each case the sacrifice that is 
latent in the service ; and showing how the efficiency of 
the service sets a limit to the extent of the sacrifice. 



THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 141 

The worker who does his work with an eye to the 
consumer's benefit, will have to sacrifice in labor the 
difference between the amount required to make a poor 
article that will barely '^get by/' and a standard article 
that is sound, durable, and serviceable. That difference 
measures the portion of the Cross of Christ he has to 
bear. 

On the other hand, to do one's work so nicely that 
one loses on every contract, cannot afford to buy tools, 
cannot pay his bills, as is the case with the over-con- 
scientious carpenter who planes both side of plank for 
a plank walk, or the housewife who keeps house so 
immaculately that she has no time or strength left to 
entertain, is to defeat in large measure the very ends 
at which reasonable sacrifice aims. To give all the 
work Good Will requires in its consideration of the 
benefits of our work to customer and consumer, and to 
stop working precisely when that point is reached, is 
the fine art of the Christian worker's sacrifice in con- 
nection with his work. 

The player who plays fair sacrifices a good many 
games he might win by unfair means. That is his 
part of the Cross of Christ. Yet it is a mistake to go 
as far as one eminent university president did in dis- 
countenancing curved pitching on the ground that it 



142 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

was intended to deceive the batter. Strategy with its 
incidental deception is an essential part of such games 
as baseball and football : and to cut that out would 
defeat the whole object and enjoyment of the game. 
When the theater, dancing, cards, billiards in any 
particular community have become so misused that 
their predominant effect on those who participate in 
them is degrading and demoralizing, it may then and 
there be part of the sacrifice Good Will requires to give 
them up. But wherever they can be reclaimed to their 
legitimate uses of recreation and wholesome social inter- 
course, then their reclamation rather than their renuncia- 
tion is the more acceptable sacrifice to Good Will. The 
use and enjoyment of these amusements up to the point 
where they predominantly injure others or ourselves, 
is a much finer and harder Christian art than either 
their excessive indulgence or their total repudiation. 

The Christian employer of labor must sacrifice what- 
ever part of his profits and his time is necessary to make 
his relations with his employees brotherly and sym- 
pathetic; the conditions of their work sanitary; and 
their remuneration just. . No employer can enjoy Good 
Will on less sacrificial terms. 

At the same time he is not called upon ordinarily to 
give his employees so much that he bankrupts his busi- 



THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 143 

ness ; fails to provide for lean years, depreciation, and 
fluctuations in demand. He is not called ordinarily to 
be so extremely sacrificial that he ceases to be an 
employer and becomes an employee. To remain an 
employer and still be a Christian; at least until there 
is a radical revolution in our methods of production and 
distribution, is the fine art which Good Will requires of 
the Christian employer. The preacher as a rule does 
not know enough about manufacturing and merchan- 
dising to draw that fine line where reasonable sacrifice 
ends and suicidal bankruptcy begins : but he should 
know enough about the sacrificial principle and its 
Kmitations to help the Christian employer to draw 
that line for himself and his business as Good Will 
directs. 

The Christian employee as his part of the cross of 
Christ must give up sabotage, soldiering, maKngering; 
all malice and uncharitableness toward his employer. 
He must regard his employer as a brother whose inter- 
ests are as precious to him as his own. Good Will, 
however, does not call upon him to take whatever wages 
and submit to whatever conditions his employer, whether 
individual or corporation, may seek to impose upon 
him. Good Will includes the workingman's rights as 
well as his duties ; and warrants him in insisting on the 



144 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

right to unite; the right to collective bargaining; the 
right to compensation for accident; and the right to 
decent conditions of labor. It is better for society and 
better for the employer in the long run, as well as better 
for the workingman that he should have these rights : 
and the preacher of Good Will is bound to stand by him 
and encourage him in all reasonable and unmalicious 
ways in which he seeks to secure and maintain his rights. 
Needless oppression; needlessly low wages; needless 
unsanitary conditions of labor are no part of the cross 
Good Will imposes on the workingman. It asks no 
workingman to be content with his wages unless those 
wages represent under prevailing conditions his fair 
share of the combined product of labor, capital, risk, 
and skill of superintendence. And it does not require 
him to be content with prevailing conditions, if he is — 
not sentimentally desirous — but reasonably sure of a 
practicable better economic order which would give 
fairer distribution without vastly lessened production. 
All the workingman is called upon to sacrifice is his 
laziness, his selfishness, his malice, his hostility, his 
recklessness and irresponsibility. Whatever Good Will 
for him, for his employer, and for society per- 
mits, he is at Hberty to pursue with all his might. 
Only what Good Will forbids toward society, toward 



THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 145 

his employer, toward himself, is he as a Christian 
employee called on to forego. 

The Christian merchant's share in the cross of Christ 
is the sacrifice of all profits over and above his fair reward 
for bringing commodities to the customer at the time and 
place, of the quahty and quantity desired. Such re- 
ward must include interest on capital, risk, loss on unsold 
goods and bad bills, skill, taste, and many other things 
besides the money and labor cost of keeping and selKng 
the articles sold. But extra profits on inferior goods: 
extra profits on misrepresentation; extra profits on 
taking unfair advantage of monopoly or the customer's 
ignorance ; extra profits secured in any way which in- 
volves treating the customer in a way he would not be 
wilHng to be treated if he knew all the facts : extra 
profits in short due to any act or attitude inconsistent 
with Good Will toward both merchant and customer, 
the merchant must forego who would live as a Christian 
in the fellowship of Good Will. The banker, the land- 
lord, the promoter, all who exchange one valuable thing 
or certificate of value for another come under this search- 
ing requirement of the Christian merchant. To sell 
for more than, all things justly and broadly considered, 
the buyer would willingly pay ; in other words for more 
than Good Will would have him pay ; is to cease to be 



146 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

a Christian. But that requirement, severe and search- 
ing as it is, leaves ample room for large returns for large 
and valuable service in the difficult spheres of exchange 
and distribution. Even on these terms a Christian 
merchant may make a great deal of money. Good 
Will gives him his just dues. 

Judged by Christian standards, in the light of Good 
Will, there is not the sharp difference between the pro- 
fessional man and the ordinary laborer or business man 
which is usually drawn. Like every worker and trader 
the lawyer, physician or preacher is bound by Good Will 
to give for a fair and reasonable fee or salary his best 
services. The only difference is as we have seen that 
the professional man, by virtue of his long and costly 
technical training, is an expert, while his clients, patients 
and parishioners are not : and consequently they cannot 
judge as readily as the buyer of ordinary goods and 
services whether or not they are getting the best that 
skill and dihgence can give them, on terms which, count- 
ing cost, preparation and quality of service, are fair and 
reasonable. For that they are mainly dependent on 
the honor of the professional man. In that sense, and 
in that only, the professions are more honorable — re- 
quire and deserve on the average a higher type of honor 
— than other vocations. All workers, laborers, mer- 



THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 147 

chants, manufacturers, professional men, to be Chris- 
tians, must charge for their services what Good Will for 
all concerned allows. But since those concerned have 
not as adequate abihty to check up the quality of the 
services and the reasonableness of the charges of the 
professional man, as they have in the case of non-pro- 
fessional workers, the professional man therefore stands 
to that extent in a little more intimate responsibility to 
Good Will. If he is not a Christian, Good Will fails 
more completely of being done, and with less oppor- 
tunity for redress, than if non-professional men in their 
vocations are disobedient. The professional man, how- 
ever, is himself an object as well as a subject of Good 
Will, and reasonable provision for his own comfort, and 
the dignity of his profession, is part of his Christian 
service. 

The scientist has his specific cross. Formerly astro- 
nomical, geological, biological truth; to-day economic, 
political, social truth, is frequently unpopular ; clashing 
with ancient prejudices, vested interests, the mental 
inertia of the aged and the well-to-do. There are places 
where the speaking of the truth would deprive a man of 
his professor's chair, his pulpit, his poHtical office, his 
reputation, his livehhood. The man who holds any of 
these things above truth has no part or lot in Good Will. 



148 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

When a scholar's views clash with tradition, preju- 
dice, or profit, the sacrifice of everything inconsistent 
with the truth as he sees it, even if it be his reputation, 
his position, his Hving, must be made cheerfully and 
bravely as the price of continued fellowship with Good 
Will, with Christ, and with all sincere Christian men. 
The scholar, however, is not under obligation to carry 
a chip on his shoulder, and provoke popular animosity 
by defiant proclamation in aggressive form of every new 
view he comes to hold. 

The teacher, the educational administrator, has a 
heavy cross to bear. Many schools, many so-called 
Christian colleges even, are honeycombed with shirk- 
ing, superficiahty, compromise, unreaHty, inefficiency, 
favoritism, slipshod ways of instruction, finance and 
management. Good Will requires every teacher, super- 
intendent, principal, president so to carry its intellectual 
and moral standards; the genuine training of the stu- 
dents ; and the service to the community through them, 
on mind and heart, that whatever loss of popularity, 
loss of numbers, loss of athletic prominence those stand- 
ards and that training for service require will be cheer- 
fully borne as the price of being Christian. Most 
teachers in schools and many teachers in colleges have 
an amount and conditions of work put upon them which 



THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 149 

are inconsistent with giving their individual pupils 
all that they really need. But whoever as teacher 
accepts as his or her ideal anything less than the best 
for those pupils his time, training, strength and execu- 
tive ability enables him to give, becomes thereby un- 
christian. Judged by what Good Will requires adminis- 
trator and teacher to do for their pupils, and for society 
through them. Christian schools and colleges are still 
as rare as the sacrifices required to make them truly 
Christian are costly. At the same time the Christian 
teacher is not called upon to kill himself by overwork ; 
still less by worry. Good Will includes the teacher's 
welfare. 

The cross of the rich Christian, as Jesus pointed out, 
is a peculiarly heavy one. To make his money service- 
able to Good Will involves so much weighing of the 
worth of one investment against another ; of one bene- 
faction against another; of one expenditure against 
another; and of each investment against all benefac- 
tions and expenditures; of each benefaction against 
all investments and expenditures ; and of each expendi- 
ture against all investments and benefactions, that those 
of us who have Httle wealth may well breathe a sigh of 
relief. For not until the amounts and proportions of 
all these uses of property are — not infalHbly, for that 



150 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

is impossible — but conscientiously determined as Good 
Will for all concerned directs, can the rich man fully enter 
or remain in the Kingdom of Good Will. Investments 
that depend for profits on hard or dishonest dealings, 
benefactions prompted by relief from importunity or 
desire for popularity, expenditures on self and family 
that do not represent in happiness and efi&ciency more 
value not only to them but to the world than would 
any practicable alternative, shut the door of the King- 
dom of Good Will in the rich man's face. Having more 
than others, he is called to sacrifice more: for apart 
from sacrifice no man can see God, or know Christ, 
or have fellowship with men and women who are really 
Christian. 

At the same time the rich Christian is not ordinarily 
called upon to give away all his goods. That would 
be a much easier and a much more useless and mischiev- 
ous act in most cases, than to use them in proportionate 
service. Good Will includes the rich man's usefulness 
and happiness ; and reasonable care for that is part of 
his Christian task. 

Whoever gives and is known to give assumes a seri- 
ous sacrifice of which the money given is often the least 
serious part. Multitudes of beggars, agents, repre- 
sentatives of benevolent causes swoop down upon him ; 



THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 151 

and if he will give according to Good Will, he must sift 
these claims, dividing the unworthy from the worthy, 
making a scale of those which through merit, propin- 
quity or affinity with his own intelligent interest, should 
take precedence. He will have to say "no" oftener 
than "yes." He will get more criticism than gratitude ; 
yet he must take it all good-naturedly and continue to 
give. For complaint, ingratitude, misunderstanding, is 
the price every giver has to pay for giving not where it 
is easiest and most popular; but where his judgment, 
interest and location make it possible to do most good 
and least harm. 

Promiscuous, indiscriminate giving almost always does 
far more harm than good. The benefactor himself, 
as well as his beneficiaries, is dear to Good Will and is 
justified in protecting himself against perpetual impor- 
tunity, and the damage that giving without careful 
investigation into need, character and efficiency is 
almost sure to do. A Httle given discriminatingly and 
wisely is much more acceptable than much given promis- 
cuously and foolishly. The preacher, at the same time 
that he trains his wealthy and poor alike to give as an 
inescapable part of their sacrifice to Good Will, must 
do all in his power to protect them from irresponsible 
agents, lazy loafers, organizations that beg money and 



152 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

maintain officers for obsolete or fantastic ends, and 
institutions that seek endowment in order to grow 
bigger rather than to be content with doing better 
the modest task to which their present funds are ad- 
equate. 

The sacrifice of the Christian soldier, in addition to 
those which are inherent in the profession, and which 
every soldier must make, is the repression of all mahce 
toward those whom he fights. Good Will permits no 
'^Song of hate"; but requires that the hands be out- 
stretched in helpfulness to the enemy the instant he 
surrenders. As long as evil men and nations bring on 
unjust wars, good men and nations must stand ready 
to fight in self-defence and in defence of humanity and 
civilization: and while Good Will sets Hmits to hate 
and malice it sets none to the energy and efficiency with 
which unavoidable war while it lasts shall be prosecuted. 
A man or nation, however, that fights where arbitration 
is a practicable substitute for war, fails utterly of the 
sacrificial spirit which is essential to fellowship in Good 
Will. 

The writer and the artist are called to sacrifice the 
easy gain and cheap fame which can be had by any writer 
or artist of mediocre abiUty who will play on the preju- 
dice or inflame the passions of blind and brutal men. 



THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 1 53 

Fame and gain come to the true artist and author; 
but there are stages in their careers when they must 
take less of these for the sake of more beauty, truth, 
purity and love. Apart from such sacrifice, actual at 
some time, potential at all times, no poet, painter, 
sculptor, can be spiritually great. 

This however is not to say that harm to some may 
not be part, and a legitimate and inevitable part, of 
strong, brave handling of unpleasant facts. If the 
creative God in his Good Will permits incidental evil, 
as we well know he does, the creative artist and author 
cannot expect to escape the same conditions and the 
same necessity. Evil that is not chosen for its own sake, 
but accepted as the condition of greater good on the 
whole is no more culpable in the human artist than in 
the divine. This limitation on the sacrifice of artist 
and author leaves him all the freedom in his art a great 
artist needs and a good artist wants. 

Sacrifice is an element in all personal relations. The 
deeper the relation, the higher the sacrifice. A friend 
is a second self : he doubles our joys and multipUes our 
interests. But his problems at the same time become 
our problems : his burdens our burdens : his disabilities 
our disabihties : his failings our failings : to be shared 
in sympathy, and removed by helpfulness. Friendship 



154 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

that seeks only gain is not friendship, but selfishness 
posing in friendship's attire. The preacher must hold 
his people up to this sacrificial side of their friendships 
and affections. 

The lover who lives and loves in Good Will must 
sacrifice all gratifications of passion that are inconsistent 
with the orderly and decent Hf e of family and society ; 
that would rob woman of her self-respect and social 
standing, and children of their birthright of physical 
health in a pure and happy home. In youth, and in the 
bachelorhood prolonged by the necessity of getting an 
economic footing before a family can be supported, this 
sacrifice, where the opportunities for indulgence are wide 
open and importunate ; where strain of work is intense ; 
and hours of leisure are either empty or filled with recre- 
ations that are suggestive and stimulative of passion, 
this sacrifice often seems a very heavy one to pay, day 
after day, year after year, through the period when 
physical vigor is at its maximum. Good Will however 
requires it : on no easier terms can Christian fellowship, 
and the complete self-respect that goes with it, be had. 
All honor to the splendid fellows, more numerous in 
America to-day than anywhere else in the world, or ever 
before, who have the strength and self-control to pay 
that heavy price! They are God's chosen ones who 



THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 1 55 

bear the brunt of civiKzation's battle with our uneHmi- 
nated brutality. 

In our admiration and our sympathy we must never 
forget or let them forget, that love in all its expressions 
is intrinsically good, not evil : and we must work by 
hospitaUty, social centers, wholesome and happy oppor- 
tunities for intimacy between young men and young 
women to make Hfe before marriage as normal as possible, 
and early marriage the privilege of as many as possible. 
It is not love or passion, or the natural attraction of the 
sexes for each other that we are called upon to sacrifice ; 
but its cruel perversions. To pure love that blesses 
all it touches there is no limit set by God's Good Will or 
man's just laws. 

When friendship and love pass into marriage and 
found the family, the joy and gladness of life reach their 
highest point. Well-married husbands and wives come 
closest to heaven. But with the gladness come sorrows : 
with the joy, and as its counterpart, come the greatest 
sacrifices one is ever called on to make : harder in some 
respects even than the sacrifice of the soldier when he 
enlists for war. For when two persons rightly marry, 
each gives up not only exclusive ownership in the income 
of his property: but himself as a self-sufiicient inde- 
pendent being. Henceforth, his property, however the 



156 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

legal title may run, is common property: his inter- 
ests are predominantly common interests : his life is 
a common life : what is good for both is the aim of each. 
Expenditures of time, money, strength: indulgences 
in amusements and recreation : risks in enterprise and 
investment which before were pardonable or even praise- 
worthy, now in competition with common interests 
and responsibihties become undesirable and even cul- 
pable. The glory of the new conjunct hfe condemns 
pretty much all that is exclusive in the old individualistic 
Kfe. Both the man and the woman have become not 
merely new creatures ; but one new creature in whom 
neither retains the old self. 

The ideal of this relation is to have all things in com- 
mon: talking over expenditures, undertakings, pleas- 
ures, duties, until the will of both is expressed in 
every act and interest of each. The next best thing, 
often the best practicable, is that the mutual interest 
shall be acknowledged once for all in general terms: 
and then by allowances of money : free disposal of time : 
liberty in forming circles of acquaintance : opportunity 
for all kinds of social life : each shall trust the other, and 
be trusted in turn, to work out the details of such indi- 
vidual self-expression as shall enrich the common life: 
and to renounce such ambitions, whether of clubs, or 



THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 1 57 

dissipations, or speculations, as are merely divisive and 
tangential : taking one out of the family life in a way 
or to an extent inconsistent with enriched and enriching 
return. 

The preacher should make his people appreciate, 
expect and prepare for this strain of readjustment as 
an inevitable part of the blessedness of married life. 
And in individual cases that seek or will accept his 
pastoral counsel he should help them and hold them to 
this inevitable sacrifice as the noble and costly side of 
the relation which he expects them to be too strong and 
brave to shirk in selfish querulousness, or evade in cow- 
ardly divorce. 

Our greatest, if not our deepest blessings, come 
through our country: its institutions, its laws, its 
Kberties, its protection of person and property. Here 
again sacrifices commensurate with these great boons are 
required of every person who worthily receives them. 
Cheerful payment of one's full fair share of taxes; 
generous devotion of time and strength to the formation 
and promulgation of sound policies; faithful work at 
the primaries and the polls ; readiness at personal cost 
to seek and hold office oneself ; help to put the right men 
into ofl&ce and to keep the wrong men out, are the least 
a man of Good Will should do as a citizen. 



158 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

Finally as the crown and consummation of this practi- 
cal devotion, day after day, year after year, in times of 
peace, comes the duty and privilege and glory of giving 
his life, or the life of husband or son, to the service of 
his country in just and righteous war. The man of 
Good Will however must rise higher than nationaKsm 
in his patriotism. President Wilson at the close of his 
message in December, 191 5, called attention to the new 
era on which we have entered. It is the era in which 
we have had the greatness of world-concerns thrust 
upon our attention. We cannot think world-thoughts 
worthily without being prepared for whatever sacri- 
fice our world-responsibilities may call. Not in readi- 
ness for aggression or insolent interference in the affairs 
of other nations: but in sympathy for all who are in 
disorder and oppression, we must be strong enough 
to render our reasonable and proportionate service; 
by peace wherever peaceful arbitration is possible: 
by war wherever righteous war is unavoidable. The 
nation that lives up to the Gospel of Good Will must 
accept the perpetual sacrifice which world-wide responsi- 
bility involves. On no easier or cheaper terms can any 
nation rise from nominal to vital Christianity. The 
more we prepare for war in this spirit, the more zeal- 
ous shall we be to avoid war, and wherever possible to 



THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 1 59 

estabKsh justice through arbitration and treaty. Here 
as everywhere sacrifice is not made for itself. The 
fearful sacrifice of war is one to be prepared for at all 
times : but actually to be made only when every device 
of patience, remonstrance, arbitration, and negotiation 
has proved unavaiKng. To have military power is 
a national necessity : to use it save as a last desperate 
resort is a national disgrace. 

The Gospel of Good Will requires the Nation to bring 
reasonable military preparedness to the altar: but it 
bids the nation search earnestly in the thicket for the 
tangled ram of such conciliation as will save the actual 
sacrifice of its sons on the red altar of war. Every 
Christian nation must stand ready to do what Belgium 
did in 1914. But we hope and pray that the spread of 
the Gospel of Good Will may render the actual offering 
of so costly a sacrifice never again a national necessity. 
Sacrifice in every case is the obverse of service : the 
price we have to pay in private loss for personal or 
social gain. That price must be paid in each case up 
to the limit where more sacrifice would involve less 
effective service ; and less efi&ciency of the servant for 
future service. All the wealth and popularity that can 
be maintained without compromise of principle it is the 
Christian's duty to secure and maintain. For Good 



l6o THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

Will includes him along with his country, his constitu- 
ents, his cause : and justifies him in taking for himself 
such remuneration and support as is not inconsistent 
with the best good of others and of all. 

The supreme sacrifice is that of Jesus Christ: and 
it was made, like our sacrifices, in loyalty to his vocation 
and his personal relationships. He felt called to preach 
the Gospel of Good Will in a community and an age 
where formaKsm, legalism, Pharisaism were on the 
throne. To preach effectively this Gospel under these 
conditions was to bring down on his head the hatred, 
jealousy and spite of those who were wedded to and 
profiting by these false gospels. By keeping quiet, 
or by confining his ministry to remote rural regions, he 
could have escaped the enmity of the rulers at the 
nation's capital. Such a policy of self-protection, how- 
ever, would have made him false to his calling ; unfaithful 
to the unshepherded sheep on whose superstitions the 
formalistic wolves were all too prone to prey. He 
refused to save himself by sacrificing the truth, and 
sacrificing his fellow-men who were entitled to hear 
the truth from his lips, and see it in his life. In fidelity 
to his vocation as the Son of Man, the typical repre- 
sentative of humanity, the Savior of the world, he pro- 
claimed his truth boldly, aggressively, persistently; 



THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE l6l 

and sacrificed his life to do it. So long as he could teach 
it more effectively by Kving than by dying, he post- 
poned his trip to Jerusalem; and escaped out of the 
imdst of his enemies. But when open attack at the cost 
of his life was the most effective witness against error 
and for truth, he did not flinch from drinking the full 
cup of torture, ignominy, and death. True to his 
vocation as revealer and teacher of the highest spiritual 
truth, he laid down his life. For the full enjoyment of 
that Gospel, and its diffused spirit and multiplied fruits 
throughout the world, we are indebted to him and to 
his sacrifice. The preacher is abundantly justified 
in making that sacrifice the central theme in his preach- 
ing, provided he preaches it not merely as a sacrifice 
made once for all to appease an estranged God ; but a 
sacrifice we must all repeat in faithful and heroic devo- 
tion to our daily tasks and social relationships. 



VI 

BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL: THE CHRISTL\N 

VIRTUES 

"My religion is very simple. I love God and all my brothers." 
Charles Rann Kennedy, The Servant in the House, p. 22. 

These words of our text are spoken by Manson, who 
represents Christ. He comes into the Vicar's household 
in the disguise of a servant, and in the regular course 
of his service, and the conversations incidental to it, 
separates in that household the sheep from the goats. 
The text contains his separating principle. If Good 
Will for all your brothers is your aim you go to his right 
hand. If honors and emoluments, promotions and 
preferments for yourself are your aim, then even though 
those honors and emoluments happen to be ecclesiasti- 
cal, your place is on the left, and your destination the 
outer darkness. 

There is in the play only one hopelessly lost soul — 
only one that even Christ can't save. He is James 
Ponsonby Makeshyfte, D.D., the Most Reverend the 

162 



BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 163 

Lord Bishop of Lancashire. And why can't Christ 
save him? Why does he turn him out of the house? 
Because his real motto is: "Give as Kttle, and grab as 

{ much as we can" ; because there are spheres of human 
Good which he despises; because he is unwilKng to 
sit at the table with a working-man ; because he fails 
to include in his idea of good the welfare of the work- 
ing-man ; because his will is no bigger than his personal 

( interests, and the dignities and emoluments of his eccle- 
siastical ofl&ce. A man can't be as Uttle as that, and 
share in the fellowship of Manson, Christ. For Christ's 
fellowship is not primarily an affair of learned lore, 
stained-glass windows, and ecclesiastical miUinery: all 
of which the Bishop has in abundance: it is genuine 
love of God and all his brothers, which the Bishop 
utterly lacks. 

The Vicar, the Reverend William Smythe, is half 
lost, half saved : and in the end is saved so as by fire. 
He has cKmbed to ecclesiastical preferment by taking 
unfair advantage of his poor brother whom he drove 
to a Kfe of dissipation: and by Kstening to the false 
and foolish advice of his ambitious wife, who loves him 
more than she loves God, and is more anxious to see him 
win a great reputation as scholar and preacher and 
churchman than to see him doing the greatest good to 



164 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

his people. There is this sign of genuineness about him, 
however, that he heartily despises the Bishop, and can't 
endure to have the old hjrpocrite around poisoning the 
air of his house. Under Manson's influence he becomes 
sincerely sorry for the wrong he has done his dissolute 
brother, Robert Smith, a humble scavenger. In the 
end he shakes off the selfishly ambitious influence of his 
too fond wife, joins his humble brother in doing the 
disagreeable and dirty work of cleaning out the church 
drain, because that happens to be what the people really 
\ need to have done. His repudiation of his wife's bale- 
ful influence is the turning point. She cares nothing 
for his real usefulness, everything for his preferment, 
as comes out in their conversation. 

Auntie 

{Now thoroughly afraid,) What do you mean by the 

truth, William? 

Vicar 

I mean this : What is the building of this church to 

you? Are you so mightily interested in architecture, 

in clerical usefulness, in the furtherance of God's work ? 

Auntie 
I am interested in your work, William. Do you take 
me for an atheist ? 



by-products of good will 165 

Vicar 
No : far worse — for an idolater ! 

Auntie 
WiUiam — 

Vicar 

What else but idolatry is this precious husband-wor- 
ship you have set up in your heart — you and all the 
women of your kind ? You barter away your own souls 
in the service of it : you build up your idols in the fashion 
of your own respectable desires: you struggle silently 
amongst yourselves, one against another, to push your 
own god foremost in the miserable Httle pantheon of 
prigs and hypocrites you have created ! 

Auntie 
{Roused) It is for your own good we do it ! 

Vicar 
Our own good ! What have you made of me ? You 
have plucked me down from whatever native godhead 
I had by gift of heaven, and hewed and hacked me into 
the semblance of your own idolatrous imagination ! By 
God, it shall go on no longer ! If you have made me less 
than a man, at least I will prove myself to be a priest ! 

Auntie 
Do you call it a priest's work to — 



l66 the gospel of good will 

Vicar 
It is my work to deKver you and me from the bondage 
of lies ! Can't you see, woman, that God and Mammon 
are about us, fighting for our souls? 

Auntie 

{Determinedly,) Listen to me, William, listen to 

me — 

Vicar 

I have listened to you too long ! 

Auntie 
You would always take my counsel before — 

Vicar 
All that is done with ! I am resolved to be a free man 
from this hour — free of lies, free of love if needs be, 
free even of you, free of everything that clogs and hin- 
ders me in the work I have to do ! I will do my own 

deed, not yours ! 

Auntie 

{With deadly quietness.) If I were not certain of one 

thing, I could never forgive you for those cruel words : 

William, this is some madness of sin that has seized you ; 

it is the temptation of the devil ! 

Vicar 
It is the call of God ! 



BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 167 

Yet even the ambitious wife is saved after much 
protestation. When the Vicar finally joins his humble 
brother, takes off his coat and sets about the dirty and 
dangerous work of cleaning out the drain, she is brought 
to give him her blessing, "God's might go with you, 
William! Accept him, Christ!" and she is last seen 
taking with one hand her husband's hand, and with her 
other hand the hand of his humble and formerly wronged 
and despised scavenger brother, so that the three form 
a kind of cross. 

The real church Manson or Christ is building, the 
church Robert, the drain-digger, belongs to, the church 
to which he and Manson win his Vicar brother and his 
ambitious wife, "ain't psalms, and 'ymns and old maids' 
tea parties, mind you"; it is "no dead pile of stones 
and unmeaning timber; no aggregation of Gothic 
arches and stained-glass windows." 

"When you enter it you hear a sound as of some mighty 
poem chanted. Listen long enough, and you will learn 
that it is made up of the beating of human hearts, of 
the nameless music of men's souls — that is, if you have 
ears. If you have eyes, you will presently see the 
church itself — a looming mystery of many shapes 
and shadows, leaping sheer from floor to dome; the 
work of no ordinary builder ! 



1 68 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

" The pillars of it go up like the brawny trunks of he- 
roes : the sweet human flesh of men and women is moulded 
about its bulwarks, strong, impregnable: the faces of 
little children laugh out from every cornerstone: the 
terrible spans and arches of it are the joined hands of 
comrades ; and up in the heights and spaces there are 
inscribed the numberless musings of all the dreamers of 
the world. It is yet building — building and built 
upon. Sometimes the work goes forward in deep dark- 
ness: sometimes in blinding light: now beneath the 
burden of unutterable anguish: now to the tune of a 
great laughter and heroic shoutings like the cry of 
thunder. Sometimes in the silence of the night-time 
one may hear the tiny hammerings of the comrades 
at work up in the dome — the comrades that have 
climbed ahead." 

Robert Smith, the dissipated scavenger brother, 
understands and is drawn to that church. ^^I think 
I begin to understand you, comride, especially that bit 
abaht the 'ammerins an' the harches. S'pose there's 
drain 'ands wanted in that there church o' yours?" 
He goes in to dig the drains. With all his bad record 
he has two redeeming traits. He is tender to his long- 
lost, new-found daughter, and he works — works for 
the good he can do. "I work — and work well ; that's 



BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 1 69 

more than some of 'em can say — and I don't get much 
money for it either." When reminded by the Vicar 
of the stench and horror and darkness of his drain dig- 
ging, he replies, ^^ What's it matter, if the comrides 
up above 'av' light an' joy an' a breath of 'olesome air 
to sing by? 'Igh in the dome, the 'ammerins of the 
comrides as 'av' climbed aloft ! " And when the Vicar 
in deepest penitence says, ^^I call myself nothing: I 
am nothing — less than nothing in all this living world," 
Robert, proud of the place in the service of the whole 
his humble vocation gives him, ' exclaims, ^^But I 
call myself summat — I'm the Drain-Man, that's what 
I am." His place and function of service, his humble 
share in doing God's Good Will, makes him brother of 
Manson, the Servant in the House — Christ. 

That is a Gospel every right-minded man in the world 
accepts as soon as he clearly sees it. Of course it is 
hard to give a twenty-minute sermon the clearness and 
force of a well-acted two-and-a-half-hours play. But 
if we take the same theme; show the greatness and 
glory of Good Will however humbly done; we shall 
get something of that response which this great play 
wherever presented has evoked. Good Will, whether in i 
a play or sermon, is the only thing big enough to make ! 
a thoughtful man give all his little self possesses in happy ; 



170 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

whole-hearted exchange. All the Christian virtues flow 
out of this love for God and all one's brothers: this 
devotion to their real good regardless of the honors 
and emoluments one's service to them may involve. 

Christian character, and all its constituent virtues, 
! are by-products of living in Good Will. To aim at 
character directly; to cultivate the Christian virtues 
like Benjamin Franklin, giving one day to patience, 
another to chastity, another to generosity, is to miss 
altogether the Christian point of view, and become a 
conceited prig. If we trust and serve Good Will, all 
these graces will come trooping after us. But if sought 
directly they fly beyond our reach. 

The most characteristic Christian virtue is modesty; 
or as the New Testament calls it meekness, humility, 
poverty of spirit, not being puffed up. One who sees 
how vast is Good Will; what splendid achievements 
it is making ; and how much remains to be done ; will 
come to see how small and how imperfect is his little 
contribution to the great whole. A young Christian, 
Uke a novice at any work or sport, may be filled with 
self-importance, and say and do things to show off his 
newly acquired accomplishments. But it is the sure 
mark of the novice — this self-centered, self-conscious 
air of importance and superiority. He who has come 



BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 171 

to admire Good Will in Christ and his fellow-Christians, 
and has learned to measure himself by that perfect 
standard, will understand how far his best achieve- 
ments fall short of it; and will be modest as a matter 
of course ; as the inevitable corollary of the plain fact 
of his manifold shortcomings. Whoever Kke the Bishop 
in the play is proud and puffed up, has failed to see Good 
Will and his own true place far below its high require- 
ments. To cultivate modesty directly is impossible : 
for the more we think we have of it, the less modest we 
are. But Good Will, by its contrast with our imperfect 
wills, induces modesty. The preacher will teach his 
people to measure themselves and each other by that 
searching standard. 

Purity of heart is likewise directly unattainable. 
The more we dwell on it, the more we are conscious by 
contrasts of the lusts over which purity is the victory. 
DwelHng on it even for the purpose of preaching it to 
others is spiritually ultra-hazardous. The more we 
think about purity the less pure we become. As Pascal 
says, ^^Few persons think of modesty modestly, or of 
chastity chastely." On the contrary, if we live in Good 
Will for all men and women, out of that thought will 
flow a reverent and tender regard for all that concerns 
their welfare : most tender and most reverent in refer- 



172 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

ence to those sacred instincts and functions on which 
the perpetuation of the race through the union of the 
sexes is so beautifully based. The Christian preacher 
will seek purity for his people, not by exhortation to it, 
but by deepening their reverence for Good Will in its 
provision for love as the fountain of life. 

Gentleness is a sickly, sentimental affair when culti- 
vated for its own sake ; and marks the mollycoddle and 
the sissy. Hard, coarse, rough brutahty is more manly. 
But the gentleness that comes of keeping before one's 
eyes and in one's heart Good Will is strong and firm. 
It refuses to hurt another's feelings, not from fear or 
weakness, but because that other person is a child of 
the Father, a brother or sister of Christ, an actual or 
potential agent of Good Will. To harm another by 
word or deed is to hurt what is dear to oneself — a stupid 
contradiction. From one in whom Good Will dwells, 
no harsh act, no cross look, no cruel word will come: 
because such acts and looks and words contradict the 
Good Will which is one's inmost principle of life. To 
be sure we have lapses here more than elsewhere; for 
our looks and tones and acts reflect too often not what 
we permanently mean to be ; but what we lapse into in 
unguarded moments. Yet if these be promptly fol- 
lowed by repentance and the request for forgiveness. 



'BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 1 73 

they cannot destroy the gentleness which is what every 
disciple of Good Will seeks to express. The preacher, 
then, will preach not gentleness directly ; but the devo- 
tion to Good Will out of which gentleness inevitably 
flows. 

Charitableness likewise, when cultivated directly, 
is an easy-going, indifferent, almost effeminate quality. 
But when it comes as the result of living in Good Will 
for others, it is at once keenly critical and kindly merci- 
ful toward their faults and failings. The Christian sees 
in his brother's failing a defeat of Good Will for him : 
and he cannot help being sorry, and hoping for better 
things next time. He cannot rejoice in another's iniq- 
uity ; both he and his brother are included in the Good 
Will which it is his precious privilege to serve. Good 
Will therefore is the seed of which charitableness is the 
fruit. 

Cheerfulness, or as the New Testament calls it, hope, 
is another Christian grace which the preacher cannot 
profitably exhort his people to cultivate, but which will 
surely follow wherever Good Will is preached persua- 
sively. Accident, sickness, poverty, loneHness, unpopu- 
larity, failure, sin, bereavement, death — one or more 
of these evils confront us most of the time : no one 
can escape them altogether. Earthquake, tornado, vol- 



174 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

cano, conflagration, flood, insect pests, war, unemploy- 
ment, over-production, imperfect distribution, robbery, 
theft, failure of employers or debtors, breakdown of 
character of those in whom our lives are bound up, 
events wholly or largely beyond our foresight and con- 
trol, bring upon us suffering and loss. If we are merely 
children of nature, desiring the good things these mis- 
fortunes take away, then we shall be at the mercy of 
these accidents, bereft and comfortless. 

The Christian preacher, however, offers the sufferer 
a chance to serve and share Good Will. Here in human 
history, in human hearts, in human homes, in Christ 
and the spirit of Christian men and women, in ourselves 
so far as we are Christian, we see, and taste, and touch 
and handle a Good Will which would not willingly sub- 
ject those whom it loves to suffering. This is the best 
thing we know in the world. Therefore we believe 
it is the purpose for which the world was made. We 
know that we cannot shield those we love from all these 
incidental and accidental evils. We do not know or 
beheve that God could do it in a world Kke this, where 
finite forces follow their own unvarjdng laws, and finite 
wills follow their own always imperfect and often per- 
verse devices. Good Will is not omnipotent in the 
sense that it can produce any specific result it pleases, 



BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 1 75 

regardless of the conditions of life in a rational and law- 
abiding world. Prayer which rests on and fosters that 
delusion is perverse ; fatal to true worship and rational 
comfort. If getting what we happen to want out of 
an arbitrarily omnipotent God is the kind of comfort 
his people crave, then the frank and honest thing for the 
preacher to say is that there is no such comfort to be 
had ; and the persons who are weak and foolish enough 
to ask for it, would not be worthy of it, even if it were 
to be had. No : God's Good Will is conditioned by the 
rational laws of its own uniform and beneficent opera- 
tion. It can achieve supernatural results; but they 
are supernatural in the sense of being above what the 
merely natural heart of man could accomplish ; not in 
being above what law will permit. 

Good Will is still at work in the world and at war with 
evil, even when evil strikes us most severely. It is 
blessing others, even when in some few particular re- 
spects the general order it permits hurts us: and we 
can rejoice in its blessing of others ; help it on ; and so 
share its outgoing to others ; be its agents ; have it in 
our hearts. And if we are fruitful, and keep on having 
Good Will toward others ; in due time others who have 
Good Will, will recognize a kindred spirit in us and 
welcome us as brothers and sisters in its fellowship and 



176 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

service. Giving it to others ; receiving it from others in 
return; we shall live more and more in it; and thus 
become more and more sure of it. Whatever accident 
or evil man may take away, this experience of being 
both object and subject of Good Will remains, and grows. 
We can be for Good Will at all times : and we can be 
assured that Good Will at all times is for us: and if 
that be for us, and we for it; nothing that happens 
can be effectively against us, or separate us from our 
fellowship with God, with Christ and with our fellow- 
Christians. We can join hands in cleaning out the drains, 
like the saved souls in the play : and in doing it we can 
be as happy as Robert Smith. 

To be sure this fellowship in Good Will cannot readily 
be extemporized in time of trouble. Those who are 
not ready when the invitation comes cannot go in to 
the feast. Those who desired only things, and lose those 
things they desired, lose all ; and naturally are comfort- 
less. But those who, with the things they had, also 
had Good Will as the spirit of their lives; doing its 
service, sharing with others its fellowship, have some- 
thing so much better than things, while they have things, 
that the best part of their life remains when the things 
they had are by accident or misfortune taken away. 
To purchase this pearl of great price they are willing to 



BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 1 77 

part with all their other possessions. No misfortunes 
can leave him bereft who keeps Good Will in his own 
heart; and shares with and receives from others this 
same precious treasure. 

Sickness may take away certain powers and forms 
through which one has expressed and enjoyed Good 
Will : but it cannot rob one who really has Good Will 
in his own heart, and rejoices to recognize it in the 
hearts of his fellows, of this his most valued possession. 
Indeed sickness often brings out within one a devotion 
to and appreciation of Good Will which health, and 
the absorption in routine health permitted, had failed 
to develop. Health can express Good Will in most 
ways so much more effectively than sickness, either 
acute or chronic, that one who has it in his heart 
will take every reasonable precaution to be well and 
keep well. Yet when sickness comes, whether from 
exposure, or overstrain, or contagion, or one's own folly, 
he will find in more patient cheerfulness; in increased 
gratitude ; in deepened tenderness, ways in which he may 
in part make up, and sometimes more than make up, 
for the forms of serving Good Will which the sickness 
has rendered temporarily or permanently impossible. 

The rest, trust, peace, and patience which Good Will 
imparts to the heart in which it dwells, does much 

N 



178 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

to hasten recovery and avert disease. A man or woman 
who regards himself or herself as the son or daughter, 
agent and embodiment of Good Will in the world, with 
some of its specific work to do and love to manifest, 
will be so regular in exercise, temperate in diet, restful 
in sleep, moderate in work, that he or she will not have 
a twentieth part of the ailments that overtake the 
man or woman who is bent on self-indulgence, or per- 
sonal ambition, or social preferment, or mere business 
success. Christianity of this sort, altogether apart 
from any special theories about the nature of disease or 
the unreality of matter, is the greatest health-giver 
and life-preserver in the world. Good Will is a Gospel 
which, if faithfully preached and practiced, for the most 
part keeps its adherents well and strong ; and yet when 
sickness does overtake them makes them patient and 
cheerful to bear it. 

The Christian preacher must also show his people 
how to be contented in whatever state they are. Pov- 
erty has its consolations for one who is in Good Will. 
The Christian, to be sure, can express more Good Will 
with ample furniture of fortune than without it. He can 
keep workmen steadily and remuneratively employed: 
educate his children : support good causes and reforms : 
help the poor: provide for the old age of himself and 



BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 1 79 

his family so much better with money than without 
it, that for the sake of these ends, all of which are 
precious in the sight of Good Will, he will earn and save 
and invest all that he can consistently with the claims 
that come upon him from day to day. Yet just because 
he seeks and holds his wealth not for itself ; and not for 
himself considered as a selfish individual ; but for Good 
Will, and for himself as its agent, the best part of his 
wealth — the end it serves — will remain with him, 
even if he fails to secure the wealth ; or if, after securing 
it, he loses it. Good Will, though in some ways it can 
be better served by the rich, in other ways can be 
effectively served by the poor. Sympathy, affection, 
appreciation are often better gifts and better services 
than those money can buy ; and these the poor are often 
able to give more generously and naturally than the rich. 
The preacher will teach his people that if they really 
live in and for Good Will, riches or poverty, though 
not as the Stoics would say indifferent, is yet a minor 
matter. Wealth honestly gained and justly and gener- 
ously used is preferable, and on the whole more service- 
able ; but poverty is also endurable, even welcome, as 
developing sympathies and charities which wealth too 
often stifles and stunts. 

Finally the Christian who lives in Good Will develops 



l8o THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

an efficiency, an economy, a serviceableness which, not 
always but frequently; not universally but generally, 
makes him friends ; finds him employment ; brings him 
recognition, help, support ; and tends to take away his 
poverty. All these things Good Will tends to add unto 
the man or woman who cheerfully, diligently, faith- 
fully, generously gives to its service what he has, be that 
little or much. Robert in the play gets his daughter, 
his brother, and even his formerly supercilious sister-in- 
law in return for the humble service he renders. 

The man who is trying to do right in a world that is 
going wrong is often like Elijah afflicted with a sense of 
loneliness. It is the preacher's privilege to show him 
that he is serving, not an unrealized ideal, but God's 
slowly coming, surely conquering Good Will, which 
generations before him have served; which millions of 
his contemporaries are serving, and which generations 
after him will serve ; and that he has a great and grow- 
ing companionship with Christ and an innumerable 
company of fellow-Christians. Nor will the minister 
permit this companionship in Good Will to remain per- 
manently one-sided. He will make sure that this man is 
recognized, appreciated, befriended, loved, by some other 
sons and daughters of Good Will, and welcomed into the 
intimacy of a friendship founded on this common bond. 



BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL l8l 

The man who lives in and works for Good Will at 
times gets criticised, makes himself unpopular: and is 
persecuted for righteousness' sake. All manner of evil 
is said against him falsely ; because there are sure to be 
persons with whose interests his service of Good Will 
fails to coincide. All the ultra-conservatives in politics 
and religion; all the thoughtless and reckless radicals; 
all the grafters; all the selfishly sensitive; all the 
sillily sentimental; all the hypocrites; all the Scribes 
and Pharisees ; all the Bishop Makeshyftes, at one time 
or another are bound to be against the man who disin- 
terestedly and conscientiously makes Good Will his 
principle of conduct. Woe to him if these people speak 
well of him ; for it is a sure sign that Good Will is feebly 
apprehended and timidly performed. To be alone and 
to be reviled is hard. But to be sure that one is saying 
and doing what Good Will, and all its honest and en- 
lightened sons, desire one to say and do, is not to be 
alone; but to have the support and approval of the 
best company on earth and in heaven. Living in such 
high and wide fellowship, one can stand the criticism 
and condemnation of those who are out of it ; or only im- 
perfectly and unintelKgently in it. Here again, usually 
but not always, in the long run the man who consist- 
ently does the Good Will soon or late comes to have 



l82 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

his integrity recognized; comes to be loved by those 
who share with him the same high service; and even 
to be respected by the very men whom he disinterestedly 
opposes ; and who from self-interest continue to oppose 
and maltreat him. It is the preacher's richest privilege 
to give the man who is persecuted for righteousness' 
sake the assurance and the experience of this divine and 
human support. 

Failure is much harder to bear than criticism. To 
work long and hard ; to do one's best ; and then from 
one's own miscalculation, or defect, or blunder; or 
from the ingratitude, greed or treachery of others to 
fail of the result at which one aims, is very hard to bear. 
If that is the whole story it is almost unendurable. Yet 
to the man who lives in Good Will that is not the whole 
story. He may fail to secure the specific object at 
which he aimed; but the preacher stands before him 
and by his side to assure him that he cannot fail to be 
in Good Will, unless by his own fault he falls out of it. 
The effort he puts forth counts as just so much added 
strength to the cause of Good Will in the world. The 
training acquired in this defeat ; the influence exerted ; 
the protest registered ; will all be helpful in the renewal 
of the same general campaign at other points and at 
later dates. No effort put forth in the service of Good 



BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 1 83 

Will can ever be lost. As the location of the ball on the 
gridiron at any given time, and the final score, are the 
resultants of all the efforts put forth on both sides ; on 
the side of the losers as well as on the side of the winners ; 
so the preacher will tell men Good Will is stronger, and 
its triumph sooner, in consequence of every ounce of 
energy, every unit of resolution, every atom of intelli- 
gence any defeated man has put forth in its behalf. 
Many battles may be lost ; many soldiers may be slain ; 
many captains may be vanquished : but the campaign, 
the cause, Good Will goes marching on: and every 
faithful fighter in its behalf; every honest worker in 
its service, has his share in the conquest he helps to 
achieve. Even his partial and temporary failure con- 
tributes its part to hasten the eternal and total triumph. 
And here too whoever keeps on fighting and working 
in Good Will draws soon or late to his side supporters 
and comrades with whose aid he makes his defeats 
progressively less, and his victories increasingly fre- 
quent. 

Every man has defects and handicaps, makes blun- 
ders, says and does f ooKsh things of which he is heartily 
ashamed. Yet if one is heartily devoted to Good Will, 
and sure of his place in its favor, even his acute mistakes 
and chronic failings cannot cast him down. Here or 



184 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

there, again and again, he may be a discredit to himself 
and to the Good Will he seeks to serve. But the 
preacher is there by his side to tell him that Good Will is 
so magnanimous ; its service is so varied ; that no man 
is so awkward and clumsy, so stupid or ill-trained, so 
inefficient and incompetent, but that on many sides and 
in many ways outwardly, and altogether in his heart 
inwardly, he can be its useful, honorable servant and 
well-beloved son. The preacher will tell him that if a 
man makes up his mind and sets his heart to count 
oneness with Good Will the supreme thing for which he 
cares ; the one thing on which he stakes his happiness : 
he will find that no physical disabilities; no mental 
weaknesses; no social disqualifications; no spiritual 
dulness, can separate him from what he most desires. 
The only disqualification that can exclude the humblest 
from the wedding feast is the deliberate neglect to put 
on the wedding garment that is freely offered to all 
invited guests — the garment of Good Will. 

In addition to our own sins and the sorrow and shame 
they bring, we have to bear the effects of the sins of 
others : the sins of a dishonest partner ; the sins of an 
unfaithful or drunken husband ; the sins of a dissolute 
son or a wayward daughter; the sins of competitors 
who make honest dealing almost financially suicidal; 



BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 185 

the sins of slanderers that destroy our good name ; the 
sins of employers who break down our health ; the sins 
of rulers that misrepresent us and plunge us into extrav- 
agance, or debt, or war. 

If we are mere children of nature, craving the good 
things of which the sins of others deprive us, we shall 
be soured, embittered, dejected, comfortless. But the 
preacher is ordained to assure us that if we believe in 
Good Will, working for the good of us and of others; 
if we enter eagerly, generously, bravely into its service, 
we shall have its fellowship and cheer ; and that is so 
much deeper and stronger and sweeter than anything 
any wrong-doer can take from us that we shall be opti- 
mists even in an environment in which to all outward 
appearance everything makes for pessimism. 

The wives of drunken and brutal husbands ; the hus- 
bands of insincere and ostentatious wives ; the employees 
of heartless corporations and the employers of shiftless 
help ; merchants who are crushed by cruel competition ; 
investors who are fleeced by unscrupulous manipulators ; 
friends who are aHenated by mischief-makers; lovers 
who are separated by worldly parents or gossiping mis- 
chief-makers : — all who suffer unjustly from the wrong- 
doing of others are welcome to enter through the open 
door of disinterested devotion the blessed fellowship 



1 86 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

of Good Will, and of all its sincere, simple, straight- 
forward disciples. Here is comfort free for all; which 
Good Will alone can give; and which no other man's 
evil will can ever take away. Whoever wishes to live 
in Good Will can have what he wishes for the asking. 
*'Ask and ye shall receive; seek and ye shall find; 
knock and it shall be opened unto you. For every 
one that asketh receiveth ; and he that seeketh findeth ; 
and to him that knocketh it shall be opened." Under- 
stood not of a future, far-off heaven; but of a present 
and intimate fellowship in Good Will, this and a host of 
kindred Scripture invitations become self-evident on 
the lips of the preacher who has the insight and tact to 
utter them at the right time and in the right way to the 
afflicted persons who need to hear them. 

Faith in immortality, grounded in faith in Good Will, 
is a distinctively Christian grace. Bereavement is the 
severest of the sufferings to which we are subjected, and 
for this the preacher must provide a comfort which is 
at once genuine and noble. Union based on mutual 
sharing of Good Will is the highest, holiest, sweetest 
thing we know here on earth : and the more we ap- 
preciate it ; the more we live by it, in it, and for it, the 
surer we grow that it is the end for which the world 
exists and for which we were born ; and that the sepa- 



BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 187 

ration of death cannot utterly defeat and destroy it. 
Proof in the sense of physical evidence of physical sur- 
vival, so that the physical order would be incomplete 
and contradictory without it, there is none. But we 
have moral and spiritual evidence of immortality in the 
sense that our highest and holiest affections ; our deepest 
and tenderest aspirations ; our bravest and noblest sacri- 
fices would be put to permanent confusion and futility if 
what we hold so precious and strive so hard to be worthy 
of were withheld. In that case we should be better, 
kinder, braver, than the world of which we are a part. 
Good Will as reflected in human hearts would be left un- 
related to a kindred Good Will at the heart of things ; a 
mere temporary sport of chance coming from and going 
to an order inferior to itself, yet triumphing over it. 
This the greatest spirits of our race, those who have 
most fully entered into and worked for Good Will, stead- 
fastly refuse to believe. Expectation of eternal service 
and fellowship in Good Will gives him who has it such 
a dignity and worth; such a strength and calm, that 
the experience of it in ourselves, or the appreciation of 
it in others, goes far to prove it ''too fair to turn out 
false." Most persons who, Kke Jesus and Paul, have 
suffered much and advanced far in this enlarging and 
uplifting fellowship simply cannot believe in, any more 



1 88 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

than they can will, the extinction of a life and love so 
precious. This assurance of faith, attested by the vast 
majority of the faithful, it is the preacher's honest privi- 
lege to offer for the comfort of all who mourn the loss 
through death of those whom the fellowship of Good 
Will had ennobled and endeared. 

Our own certain death, if we are living in this faith, 
gives us no anxiety and no alarm. There as here, for- 
ever as now, we serenely trust Good Will to make a 
heaven which it will be our privilege to serve and share. 
For a heaven not upbuilt by the free and harmonious 
effort of many sons and servants of Good Will would 
be no heaven : and with no such work to do and cause 
to serve, neither Good Will, nor our wills a sharers of 
it, would have worth or meaning. For, as the idealists 
tell us, to be or to exist at all means to fulfil purpose ; 
and a purpose that makes the present life noble, and 
requires eternity for its fulfilment, is the pledge and 
prophecy of a blessed immortality. 

In addition to the idealistic evidence that immor- 
tality in Good Will is the only satisfactory fulfilment of 
the world-purpose, there is the pragmatic evidence 
that whoever hath this hope in him purifieth himself 
even as Good Will is pure. One cannot cherish the 
anticipation of an eternal life of perfect Good Will, and 



BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 189 

at the same time cherish maUce and pride and cruelty 
and greed and sloth. 

This faith makes judgment automatic and inexorable. 
In the clear transparency of the spiritual world those 
who have Good Will are forever welcome to its fellow- 
ship: those who have the lurking grudge, the mean 
jealousy, the hollow insincerity, are automatically shut 
out. 

Pictorial representations of this automatic judg- 
ment by Good Will, are found at the end of Plato's 
" Gorgias," and in Jesus' parable of the Last Judgment. 
PhilHps Brooks' sermon on "The Law of Liberty" also 
states it beautifully and convincingly. 

"By this law we shall be judged. How simple and 
sublime it makes the judgment day ! We stand before 
the great white throne and wait our verdict. We watch 
the closed Hps of the Eternal Judge, and our hearts 
stand still until those lips shall open and pronounce 
our fate ; heaven or hell. The Kps do not open. The 
Judge just lifts His hand and raises from each soul 
before Him every law of constraint whose pressure 
has been its education. He lifts the laws of constraint 
and their results are manifest. The real intrinsic na- 
ture of each soul leaps to the surface. Each soul's 
law of liberty becomes supreme. And each soul, with- 



190 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

out one word of condemnation or approval, by its own 
inner tendency, seeks its own place. They turn and 
separate, father from child, brother from brother, wife 
from husband, each with the old habitual restrictions 
lifted off, turns to its own ; one by an inner power to the 
right hand, another by a like power to the left; these 
up to heaven, and these down to hell. Do we need 
more? It needs no word, no smile, no frown. The 
freeing of souls is the judging of souls. A liberated 
nature dictates its own destiny." 

A partial foretaste of this final judgment those who 
live in Good Will achieve here and now, in the spiritual 
discernment with which they joyfully recognize and are 
recognized by a kindred Good Will in those of their 
fellows who have it : and perceive and pity the absence 
of it, and consequently the impossibihty of spiritual 
fellowship, in those who have it not. 



VII 

GOOD WILL IN SOCIETY: REFORM 

"We all love power — to be on the winning side. You cannot 
help being there when you are fighting the slum, for it is the cause 
of justice and right. How then can you lose ? And what matters 
it how you fare, your cause is bound to wdn. Every defeat in 
such a fight is a step towards victory, taken in the right spirit. 
In the end you will come out ahead. With a mother who prays, 
a wife who fills the house with song, and the laughter of happy 
children about me, all my dreams come true or coming true, why 
should I not be content ? In fact I know no better equipment for 
making them come true : faith in God to make all things possible 
that are right: faith in man to get them done: fun enough in 
between to keep them from spoiling or running off the track into 
useless crankery. An extra good sprinkling of that!" Jacob A. 
Riis, The Making of an American^ pp. 424-425 : 431-432. 

With these passages from the ^^ Making of an Ameri- 
can '' for our text^ we will go to the same happy warrior's 
^^The Battle with the Slum" for our lesson. 

*^The battle with the slum began the day civilization 
recognized in it her enemy. It was a losing fight until 
conscience joined forces with fear and self-interest against 

191 



192 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

it. When common sense and the golden rule obtain 
among men as a rule of practice, it will be over. 

^^ The slum complaint had been chronic in all ages, but 
the great changes which the nineteenth century saw, the 
new industry, political freedom, brought on an acute 
attack which put that very freedom in jeopardy. Too 
many of us had supposed that, built as our common- 
wealth was on universal suffrage, it would be proof 
against the complaints that harassed older states ; but 
in fact it turned out that there was extra hazard in that. 
Having solemnly resolved that all men are created 
equal and have certain inalienable rights, among them 
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we shut our 
eyes and waited for the formula to work. It was as if a 
man with a cold should take the doctor's prescription to 
bed with him, expecting it to cure him. The formula 
was all right, but merely repeating it worked no cure. 
When, after a hundred years, we opened our eyes, it was 
upon sixty cents a day as the living wage of the working- 
woman in our cities; upon ^knee pants' at forty cents 
a dozen for the making ; upon the Potter's Field taking 
tithe of our city life, ten per cent each year for the trench, 
truly the Lost Tenth of the slum. Our country had 
grown great and rich ; through our ports was poured food 
for the millions of Europe. But in the back streets mul- 



GOOD WILL IN society: REFORM 1 93 

titudes huddled in ignorance and want. The foreign 
oppressor had been vanquished, the fetters stricken from 
the black man at home ; but his white brother, in his 
bitter plight, sent up a cry of distress that had in it a dis- 
tinct note of menace. PoKtical freedom we had won; 
but the problem of helpless poverty, grown vast with the 
added offscourings of the Old World, mocked us, imsolved. 
Liberty at sixty cents a day set presently its stamp upon 
the government of our cities, and it became the scandal 
and the peril of our political system. 

^^Slow work, yes! but be it ever so slow, the battle 
has got to be fought, and fought out. For it is one 
thing or the other ; either we wipe out the slum, or it 
wipes out us. Let there be no mistake about this. It 
cannot be shirked. Shirking means surrender, and 
surrender means the end of government by the people. 
We are brothers whether we own it or not, and when 
the brotherhood is denied in Mulberry Street we shall 
look vainly for the virtue of good citizenship on Fifth 
Avenue. 

^^In the battle with the slums we win or we perish. 
There is no middle way. We shall win, for we are not 
letting things be the way our fathers did. But it will be 
a running fight, and it is not going to be won in two years, 
or in ten, or in twenty. For all that, we must keep on 
o 



194 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

fighting, content if in our time we avert the punishment 
that waits upon the third and the fourth generation of 
those who forget the brotherhood. As a man does in 
deahng with his brother so it is the way of God that his 
children shall reap." 

The slum is simply society's diseased tissue at its most 
inflamed point. What Mr. Riis says of it is true of the 
whole long list of poUtical, economic, social, and moral 
and international reforms. 

Society is imperfect. It is never a complete expres- 
sion of Good Will. It is the resultant of Good Will on 
the one side, and of resisting matter and hard human 
hearts on the other. There are usually two sides to a 
social question; and some truth on each side. There 
are two ways of taking each side : one that is right and 
one that is wrong. Ordinarily it is not the preacher's 
business to tell his people which side of a debatable social 
question they shall take : but to show them how to take 
whichever side they join in the right and not in the wrong 
way. 

For instance the preacher ought not to tell his people 
whether to vote the Republican or the Democratic ticket. 
If he attempts to do so he will antagonize good people 
in his congregation who honestly differ from him : and 
to that extent forfeit and deserve to forfeit his influence 



GOOD WILL IN society: REFORM 195 

over them for more important issues. He ought to draw 
a sharp line, not between Republicans and Democrats ; 
but between Christian Republicans and heathen Republi- 
cans ; between Christian Democrats and heathen Demo- 
crats. 

Who then is a Christian Republican? and who is 
a heathen Republican? Who is a Christian Democrat, 
and who is a heathen Democrat ? 

A Christian Republican is a man who believes that 
Good Will calls for a strong centralized government, in 
which the power of the whole is made effective for the 
benefit of each part : in which the profit of the individual 
and the prejudice of the locality is sacrificed to the inter- 
est of all and the judgment of the nation. He is willing 
to pay a higher tariff to keep in employment working- 
men in whom he has no direct interest ; he is glad to pay 
a bigger tax to have forests conserved, deserts irrigated, 
rivers and harbors dredged, hundreds of miles from his 
home ; to have scientific researches prosecuted ; explora- 
tions made ; foreign policies maintained, and the miHtary 
and naval power requisite for their support developed. 
The Christian RepubUcan desires the nation to do all 
the Good Will it can ; even at the expense of his pri- 
vate, local interests as a consumer of a particular com- 
modity ; as a dweller in this or that town or state ; as a 



196 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

member of this or that profession or vocation. To make 
Repubhcans Christian Republicans — Republicans who 
desire the nation to express all the Good Will it can, at 
whatever cost of taxation ; at whatever risk of corruption 
centralized power inevitably invites : believing the benefi- 
cence on the whole outweighs the corruption ; and the 
good of the whole is greater than the cost to its constit- 
uent parts : — that is the preacher's duty to his Re- 
publican parishioners. 

On the other hand, if there is in his congregation a Re- 
publican who, just because he happens to be a manufac- 
turer of woollen or tin goods, does not care how much 
more his fellow-citizens have to pay for their coats and 
dinner pails, so long as that increase comes to him and 
his locaKty and his business in extra profits ; who is a 
Republican for the sake of Republican office or Republi- 
can graft ; it is the business of the preacher to make him 
ashamed of himself : to show him that as such a Repub- 
lican he can have no part or lot in Good Will for his 
country ; and brand him as the parasite and traitor that 
he is. 

The Christian preacher likewise will try to make his 
Democratic parishioners Christian Democrats : Demo- 
crats, that is, who stand for the principle that the locality, 
the special interest, the individual should be let alone as 



GOOD WILL IN society: REFORM 197 

much as possible ; that the individual can make a better 
use of his money and manage his local affairs better than 
a central government can manage them for him; and 
that a sturdy independence is better for all concerned, 
and therefore for the nation as a whole, than a nursed, 
coddled and fostered prosperity provided and controlled 
by governmental agency. 

Bad Democrats, on the other hand : Democrats who 
care not how the working-man must reduce his standard 
of hving, or even go hungry, if only they buy their goods 
cheap ; Democrats who are indifferent to the destruction 
of our forests, the obstruction of river and harbor trafl&c, 
the decline of efl&ciency in army and navy, so long as 
taxes are low : Democrats who are in politics for their 
pockets rather than their principles : — these the preacher 
will rebuke in the same searching and merciless way as 
he does their RepubKcan counterparts, as traitors to 
their country and enemies of Good Will. 

If this is the attitude of the preacher toward the two 
great parties, what shall it be toward parties that spring 
up in support of moral issues, Hke the Progressives 
and the Prohibitionists? Precisely the same. There 
are Christian Progressives and unchristian Progressives ; 
Christian Prohibitionists and unchristian Prohibition- 
ists. The Christian Progressive sees the poKtical ma- 



igS THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

chines of both old parties grinding and crushing the 
people they were created to serve; captured and cor- 
rupted by powerful vested interests : and he stands for 
the restoration of power to the people ; and the recapture 
in their interest of both governmental and party machin- 
ery. The Progressive with this programme is a Christian : 
and the preacher will honor and encourage him as a man 
who stands for important aspects of Good Will which in 
the strife of the regular parties, and by corrupt alliance 
among the leaders of both of them, had come to be neg- 
lected. 

The unchristian Progressives, the disgruntled office- 
seekers who hope for personal advancement in a new 
party, the unpractical visionaries, the temperamental 
agitators, who fasten themselves upon every new move- 
ment, the preacher will condemn as useless and mis- 
chievous disturbers of the peace. 

The Christian Prohibitionist likewise ; the man who 
sees clearly and feels deeply the misery and degradation 
and corruption the sale of liquor carries in its train; 
and who believes that for the moment the pushing of the 
fight against this evil is more important than the support 
of the great domestic and foreign policies for which the 
regular parties stand : — the Christian Prohibitionist 
should be honored and upheld. The unchristian Prohi- 



GOOD WILL IN society: REFORM 1 99 

bitionist ; the man who sees only one issue at a time, 
and sees that red and reckless ; the denunciatory Pro- 
hibitionist, the ascetic Prohibitionist, the self-exalting 
Prohibitionist, the Christian minister, with such gentle- 
ness and humor as he can command, will criticise and 
expose. 

The Christian preacher, whatever he may do as citizen 
outside the pulpit, will not, as preacher, be a partisan of 
any party : he will not preach RepubHcan, or Democratic, 
or Progressive, or Prohibitionist doctrine. He will be a 
partisan of Good Will in all these parties, and the foe to 
whatever in any of them opposes it. He will hold the 
Gospel of Good Will so precious, that he will not risk his 
influence for that by antagonizing in the pulpit honest 
beliefs of his people on minor matters of detail. 

Before we can see the preacher's duty toward industrial 
problems and parties we must call to mind the present 
stage of industrial development. 

As long as Kf e was simple, as long as every man was half 
farmer, half jack-at-all-trades, as long as business con- 
sisted chiefly in the exchange of goods and services be- 
tween individuals who were approximately equal, if not 
in wealth, at least in opportunity, individual justice, 
justice between man and man, was all the justice needed. 
Now that many essential services, like transportation, 



200 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

light, water, communication, have become monopolies; 
and most of the rest through concentration of capital 
and mutual understandings have acquired many of the 
attributes of virtual monopoly, the individual in buying 
these commodities and services, and in selling his own 
services and products, is no longer on an approximate 
equality with the public service corporation or even the 
private corporation ; but largely at its mercy. But the 
mercy of a corporation is proverbially lacking. A cor- 
poration, left to itself, becomes a mere machine for de- 
claring dividends ; with both mercy and justice, to say 
the least, not in the focus, but at best on the dim pe- 
riphery of its attention. 

Since the corporation ordinarily cannot be made dis- 
interestedly and directly expressive of Good Will, it be- 
comes necessary for some commission, or board of con- 
trol, to be placed over it to compel it to conform not 
merely to the letter of the law, but to the spirit of Good 
Will. Such commissions or boards have as their function 
the enforcement of the rights of patrons and employees ; 
the prevention of violation of the spirit as well as the 
letter of the law ; and the definition of the terms and ap- 
plications of the law when they are uncertain or in dis- 
pute. 

The object of these laws and commissions is to lift the 



- GOOD WILL IN society: REFORM 20I 

plane of competition where there is competition ; and to 
restrain the power of monopoly where there is monopoly. 
Protection against the exploitation of child labor: re- 
striction of the hours and the conditions of the labor 
of women and children: provision for working-men's 
compensation in case of accident, so that the cost of such 
accidents shall not fall on the poor working-man or his 
family, but shall be distributed among the consumers 
of the product as part of its just price : working-men's 
insurance at moderate rates, with state protection and 
support, instead of the exorbitant terms and tricky poli- 
cies which uncontrolled private companies have imposed : 
— these are some of the more urgent reforms Good Will 
has been demanding and will continue to demand in the 
immediate future. 

Welfare work ; rest rooms ; provision for limcheon at 
moderate cost; recreation and social opportunities for 
employees are other forms Good Will takes when it enters 
the heart of a powerful individual or corporation and 
controls its attitude toward employees. Recognition of 
labor unions ; readiness to deal with them ; a grateful 
sense of whatever help they can give their employees 
toward just wages and wholesome hours and conditions 
of work is another sign that Good Will toward the em- 
ployees is present in the heart of the employer. 



202 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

When possible on an open, fair and honest basis, profit- 
sharing is the crowning consummation of Good Will 
under the competitive system of production and distri- 
bution. When capitalist, entrepreneur and working- 
man, each and all have a share proportioned to their 
contribution to the profits of their joint enterprise ; then 
we have as much Good Will in industry as present condi- 
tions permit, and the immediate future promises as prac- 
tically possible. 

When Good Will in business has achieved public con- 
trol of the plane of competition, arbitration, welfare work, 
profit-sharing, working-men's participation in manage- 
ment, there will doubtless develop the need of further 
safeguards and firmer cooperation ; and these may in- 
volve steps still further in the direction of sociaHsm. 
When they prove their beneficence and practicality Good 
Will in men and society will adopt them. But for the 
present and the immediate future those who have this 
Good Will must be careful not to let go the values of 
independence, initiative, and resourcefulness in the 
competitive system, before they are sure of greater gains 
from socialistic experiments. 

IndividuaHsm aims to give each man all the liberty 
consistent with the like liberty for everybody else. But 
there are two fatal indictments against uncontrolled 



GOOD WILL EST SOCIETY: REFORM 203 

individuaKsm under modern conditions. First : liberty 
is not an end but a means ; and when set up as an end 
amounts only to an empty abstraction : good as a war- 
cry in times of revolution against tyranny, but entirely 
incapable of producing a satisfactory mode of life. We 
need freedom not from tyranny only but in participation 
in a common good ; and of this freedom in a common 
good individualism gives the mere form without the sub- 
stance. 

Second : the liberty individualism offers, however it 
might work out between equals, when applied to parties 
grossly unequal inevitably results in the enslavement of the 
weaker by the stronger. The hberty offered by individu- 
alism turns out to be no hberty at all : for to the weaker 
party it presents the alternative : — ^^ Accept the terms 
offered by the stronger, or starve on terms satisfactory 
to yourself^' : — which is practically no alternative at all. 

SociaHsm is weak in just the opposite way. Individ- 
uaUsm provides goods and services ; but at cruel cost to 
the exploited laborers. SociaUsm promises to take 
excellent care of the laborer ; so good care in fact that the 
individualistic motive to enterprise and thrift would 
be greatly in danger of becoming relaxed. But where 
/ are the goods and services coming from if the nerve of 
^ individual responsibihty is cut ? 



204 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

The post-ofl&ce is cited as an example of coUectivist 
efl&ciency. Yet the efl&ciency of the post-office comes 
through men trained under the regime of competition. 
As long as the momentum of individualistic initiative 
lasted, sociaHsm would work ; but that would not be for 
long. Socialism in its more extreme form is conceivable 
only as the first stage in a process of economic degrada- 
tion ; the brief stage namely during which the momentum 
acquired under individualism would last. Individualism 
gives us magnificently efficient and economical produc- 
tion with grossly unjust and unequal distribution. So- 
cialism offers us just and generous distribution, with 
enormously decreased and deteriorated products to dis- 
tribute. One offers the empty heart and the full hands ; 
the other the full heart and the empty hands. 

The preacher's duty is the same toward economic 
policies as toward politics. He must see and approve 
the good in individualism ; and see and condemn the evil 
in individuahsm. He must see and approve the good in 
socialism; and see and condemn the evil in socialism. 
As preacher he can rarely venture to say at what precise 
moment and to what precise extent free contract shall 
end and government control begin ; government control 
end and government ownership begin. As preacher 
his task is to make free contract considerate ; knowing 



GOOD WILL IN society: REFORM 205 

that considerate contract leads logically and emotionally 
to proj&t-sharing, welfare work or government control : 
to make government control impartial as between cap- 
italist, consumer and employee ; knowing that the logic 
of control of services, rates and wages drives inexorably 
in the direction of government ownership. 

On the other hand, if ever, and so far as, government, 
ownership, or a control amounting to virtual ownership, 
is reached, it will become the urgent duty of the Chris- 
tian preacher to preach with all his might the old in- 
dividualistic virtues of economy, industry, diligence, 
initiative, enterprise: for when once the competitive 
motives to these individuaHstic virtues are withdrawn 
disinterested Christian benevolence will be the only safe- 
guard against laziness, shiftlessness, stupidity, corrup- 
tion, reaction, and retrogression. Under the individual- 
istic regime, the phases of Good Will most needing to be 
preached are the socialistic virtues : under the sociaKstic 
regime the virtues most needing to be preached would 
be the individualistic virtues. But the Christian 
preacher should never become either the mere individ- 
ualist or the mere socialist. His business is to help in- 
dividualists to be Christian individualists, and in so 
doing he will carry them a long way toward sociaUsm. 
His business is likewise to help socialists to be Christian 



206 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

socialists, and if he does that effectively he will hold 
them to the homely individual virtues which too many 
socialists sadly lack, and by lacking seriously discredit 
their cause. 

Thus the Christian preacher's vocation is to serve 
both economic parties ; and is equally important which- 
ever of the two happens to be uppermost. At the same 
time since he preaches not what men like but what they 
need ; and men always need most the qualities, not of 
the order under which they are living and which are en- 
forced by that order, but the qualities of the order 
under which they are not living and but for the preacher 
would be unenforced, the preacher's message on these 
subjects in neither case can be altogether popular. 

The wise minister will not preach directly for or 
against woman's suffrage. He will scorn to withhold 
from woman anything that would add to her dignity 
and power which she reasonably and earnestly desires. 
At the same time he will so magnify her contributions 
as wife, mother, comrade, friend, hostess and teacher, 
that her possible service as voter will be seen to be a 
very minor fraction of her total service to society. 
^ If in politics and labor problems the preacher must 

see and serve Good Will on both sides of controverted 
questions, in the family may he not take sides, and lay 



GOOD WILL IN society: REFORM 207 

down the law for society to follow? Many preachers 
so assume; and many laymen acquiesce. But here 
again his highest usefulness lies not in hot partisanship 
nor cold neutrality ; but in helpful service to the needs 
of both parties. 

Divorce is of course the burning issue respecting the 
family. The Christian preacher as the exponent of 
Good Will holds up as the ideal for every normal man and 
woman indissoluble monogamous marriage. Mankind's 
prolonged experiment in living has proved that for the 
normal individual in a normal society such marriage is 
happiest, holiest and best for all concerned. The whole 
trend and tendency of the Christian minister's teaching 
and preaching will make for such permanent and fruitful 
union. He will include the promise of such a union in 
the marriage ceremony. He will counsel patience and 
forbearance when married men and women seek his 
advice in times of strain. He will train young men and 
women to regard marriage as a lifelong obligation to 
be fulfilled at cost of serious sacrifice. He will refuse 
to remarry persons who in selfishness and petulance, 
restlessness or infatuation, have been divorced. For the 
sake of the priceless blessings lifelong devotion brings to 
husband and wife, to parents and children, to family 
and society, he will urge men and women to pay the 



208 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

high price that devotion frequently costs when the other 
party is poor, or sick, or irritable, or unreasonable. On 
no lower or easier terms can Good Will for the family 
be proclaimed. 

Yet when the pearls of a pure affection are persistently 
trampled under the feet of swinish greed, lust, and hate- 
fulness; when through no fault of the innocent party 
life for him or her is made intolerable with no prospect 
of benefit or blessing to the guilty one ; then the Chris- 
tian minister will recognize what most Christian states 
already allow — the right of the innocent party to divorce 
and remarriage. The true marriage is so much more 
blessed than any other mode of life that it does not need 
to be bolstered up by the enforced continuity of marriages 
which are perverted into loathsome sensuality, hideous 
hate, intolerable wretchedness. The Christian preacher 
should have so much sympathy for the unhappy vic- 
tims of bad marriages, and so much respect for the 
blessedness of good marriages, that he will recognize and 
approve the desire to escape the bondage and degrada- 
tion of such an unchristian union. He will not in a 
spirit of formal literalism ask whether the guilty party 
has committed the one specific sin which Jesus happened 
to mention as a legitimate ground of divorce. He will 
ask in a broad, sympathetic, common-sense spirit whether 



GOOD WILL IN society: REFORM 209 

Good Will for the individuals concerned and for society 
calls them to continue to pay this heavy price or not. 
If in his best judgment it does not, he will sanction 
divorce; admit the innocent divorced person to the 
fullest Christian fellowship; and even perform the 
marriage ceremony where there is the promise and pros- 
pect of a new and happy lifelong marriage. To do less 
than that would be to miss the spirit of Good Will, 
through being a stickler for the precise letter in which 
its general conditions were declared by Jesus and em- 
bodied in the Holy Scriptures — an attitude which is 
imworthy of the free and friendly preacher of Good 
Will. 

If politics, economics and the family are to be treated 
by the preacher indirectly through principles rather 
than directly in detail, surely distinctly moral problems 
like the brothel, the saloon, and the gambling den are 
spheres in which the preacher may advocate specific 
social programmes. Not on questions where there is 
honest and earnest difference of opinion between men of 
equal Good Will ; at least not unless he gives full and 
generous acknowledgment to the earnest and honest 
Good Will of his opponents. Even here he will be most 
effective as preacher, whatever he may do in his capacity 
as an individual citizen, if he confines his preaching for 



2IO THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

the most part to principles; and leaves to the mayor, 
the police, good government clubs and the voters the 
specific measures in which his principles shall be em- 
bodied. 

Concerning the social evil it is his province to make men 
see and feel and reverence the beauty and beneficence 
of Nature's provision for the reproduction and im- 
provement of the human race through the selection of 
the best in each of two individuals brought together by 
the mighty attraction of sex. The hoKness of pure love 
he will teach them to revere as God's choicest gift. 
On the background of such a reverence he will throw 
the beastliness of the lust that would pollute and pervert 
it in selfish and irresponsible sensuality ; so that every 
man who hears his message will be ashamed to treat any 
woman with anything less than chivalry. On this back- 
ground he will throw the odiousness and cruelty of the 
greed that destroys and sells the bodies and souls of 
women for the gratification of the lusts of brutal men. 
The preacher will make the whole sordid and loathsome 
traffic to appear the cruel, monstrous, degrading contra- 
diction of Good Will it is. Having created and kept 
alive that sentiment his work as preacher is done : and 
if that is faithfully, fearlessly and effectively done, the 
proper legislative, executive, and police measures will 



GOOD WILL IN society: REFORM 211 

follow in proportion to the political, business and social 
influence his congregation has in the community; and 
the minister will be more not less a power, than if as 
preacher he were to attempt to say whether this or that 
specific regulation shall be adopted. The Christian 
ministry always has been and always will be the most 
potent foe of this unspeakable iniquity : and in the future 
as in the past the preacher's main contribution will be 
sentiment aroused by principles, rather than legislation 
applied or misapplied in details. < 

The same is true of intemperance. The horror and 
beastliness of it ; the cruelty to wife and children ; the 
injury to society and posterity will be a frequent theme 
with the preacher whose people are subject to that temp- 
tation. He will unsparingly denounce the meanness and 
infamy of men who make a sordid Kving* by catering to 
the vices of the weak, and impoverishing their wretched 
families. If this is temperately, faithfully and fearlessly 
done, poKtical action in restriction of the liquor traffic will 
follow : and follow all the more surely and effectively than 
it would were the preacher to attempt to tell his people 
to vote to put prohibition into the state or national 
constitution before there is sentiment to enforce it in 
the villages and cities of which the state and nation 
are composed. As a citizen the preacher may make 



212 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

stump speeches if he please ; but the pulpit is not the 
place, nor the hour of Sabbath worship the time, to ad- 
vocate state-wide statutes, or amendments to the con- 
stitution of the country. Important as those things are, 
the preacher has larger and less divisive issues : issues, 
too, on which he is or ought to be more of an expert than 
he usually can be in constitutional amendments, statutes 
and police regulations. 

The same principle governs the minister's attitude 
toward international affairs. He will instil into the 
minds of his people the horror, the futihty, the waste, 
the wickedness of all war that is honorably avoidable. 
He will point out the infinitely superior economy and 
efficiency of arbitration where that is practicable. He 
will labor to build up a sentiment which will unite the 
nations in a league of peace. 

Yet he will recognize that, to say nothing of barbarous 
tribes, even nominally Christian nations are not yet 
actually Christian in their policies toward other nations. 

Whenever self-defence against wanton and arrogant 
aggression demands it, whenever weak nations for which 
we have by treaty or proximity special national obli- 
gations need our protection against outward attack or 
protracted internal strife, wherever the maintenance of 
the laws and rights of nations against their unscrupulous 



GOOD WILL IN society: REFORM 213 

and deliberate disregard requires it, then rightfully 
and firmly he will call upon his nation, as he would an 
individual in similar situation, to take up arms ; not in 
maKce, not for aggrandizement or glory, but as a costly 
sacrifice essential to the doing by the nation of its part 
in the service of Good Will. 

Peace-making and peace-loving as every minister of 
Christ must be, he will advocate such sufficient pre- 
paredness for war at all times as will reduce to a min- 
imum the necessity for actual war; and make the 
nation's voice effective in behalf of international 
justice. Bitterly as he opposes militarism he will 
advocate so much mihtary strength in his own na- 
tion as is necessary to protect both his own nation 
and the world from domination by those nations in 
which it is enthroned. 

On all these matters, and a host of others, child labor, 
the juvenile court, prison reform, charity administra- 
tion, rural betterment, civil service reform, arbitration 
of industrial disputes, the minister may not be xinin- 
telligent or indifferent: neither can he wisely be dic- 
tatorial in detail. To create and sustain sound convic- 
tions and Uvely sentiment is his mighty province, a 
province so mighty that he makes a fearful mistake when 
he forfeits his authority and influence within it to con- 



214 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

tend over the debatable details of their application. 
Not of course that details and applications are unim- 
portant; or that principles and sentiment amount to 
anything unless they are applied in detail. But in the 
intricate and delicate team-work of society, principles 
and sentiments are the Christian minister's specific 
assignment: while application in detail through legis- 
lation and administration are not. Let the minister 
stick to his assignment; and urge the other social 
agencies to be faithful to theirs : and through the united 
efforts of clergy and laity, preacher and citizens. Good 
Will is sure to be done more effectively than if ministers 
seek to legislate and enforce; while the citizens are 
left hazy about spiritual principles, and spiritless in 
moral sentiment. 

This team-work view of the minister's relation to social 
problems is at present far less popular than the indi- 
vidual-star view, which measures the minister by what 
he can accomplish directly, and set down to his individual 
credit. But the sacrifice of individual credit for speedy 
and showy specific results is the price one has to pay 
everywhere for the greater ultimate eflSciency of team- 
work. 

To this principle there are of course exceptions in 
times of acute crises; when the minister happens to 



GOOD WILL IN society: REFORM 21 5 

be at the same time an expert in politics, or economics, or 
social reform ; or when no layman or group of laymen can 
be induced to take the lead in appKcation of Christian 
principles to crying social needs and wrongs. Then the 
minister may be forgiven if he temporarily leaves the 
ministry of the word to serve tables ; if he neglects the 
cultivation of sound convictions and earnest sentiments 
in others to become himself on his own account a leader 
in a Republican, or Democratic, or Progressive, or 
Prohibition campaign ; or to take sides in a lockout or 
strike ; or to close this or that specific saloon. 

Of course all that has been said about the minister as 
minister in the pulpit, and in his pastoral relations, does 
not interfere with the minister's doing his part as a 
citizen side by side with his fellow-citizens of his own 
and other parishes in direct political, economic, moral 
and social reform. 

Mr. Riis was offered repeatedly political ofl&ces in 
which to carry on his fight against the slum. But he 
invariably declined with the remark that he could do 
most by sticking to his last as a reporter. 

Unless he be an exceptional man in exceptional circum- 
stances the preacher will do best to follow his example. 
Direct activity in specific measures of reform is not a bur- 
den to be laid on the shoulders of every preacher : and it 



2l6 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

is grossly unfair to judge the ministry by such an expecta- 
tion. If he is fitted to be a preacher at all his chief 
efficiency will come through the convictions and senti- 
ments he imparts and quickens in the men and women 
to whom he ministers. 



VIII 

FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH 

"The new Church Universal, then, would be the militant, 
aggressive body of the reborn, whose mission it was to send out 
into the life of the nation transformed men and women who would 
labor unremittingly for the Kingdom of God. The supreme func- 
tion of the church was to inspire — to inspire individuals to will- 
ing service for the cause, the Cause of Democracy, the fellowship 
of mankind." Winston Churchill, The Inside of the Cup, p. 366. 

The book from which our final text and lesson is 
taken strikes simultaneously two notes : service of the 
fellowship of mankind, and intellectual honesty. The 
former is our theme. A generation ago the latter was 
the burning issue. It is important still. Good Will 
has no afl&nity with falsehood. Yet that is not the 
burning question to-day. A man, as the result of early- 
training and environment, may hold views about such 
matters as the virgin birth which critical, scientific his- 
tory finds it impossible to accept : and at the same time 
be a devoted and accepted servant of Good Will, a man 
the latchet of whose shoes the critical, scientific his- 

217 



2l8 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

torian is not worthy to unloose. And on the contrary 
a man may be scientifically correct in his views about 
these matters, and still be at the farthest remove from 
that Good Will in which vital Christianity consists. 

Our lesson from this book is in two parts : the first, 
negative and specific, showing precisely what the true 
Church and its members cannot be — selfish plunderers 
of their fellows under respectable disguise : the second 
positive but abstract, showing the attitude toward Hfe 
the Church and its members must take : and that for 
this attitude there can be no dogmatic, traditional, or 
rituaHstic substitute. 

The first part, the description of what the church can- 
not be and cannot tolerate in its members without its 
own stultification is put into the mouth of a working- 
man, Garvin, who has lost his fortune, and is in danger 
of losing his child, as the result of the dishonest deaHngs 
of the prominent churchman, Eldon Parr. 

*^ ^ Well, I was a Traction sucker, all right, and I guess 
you wouldn't have to walk more than two blocks to find 
another in this neighborhood. You think Eldon Parr's 
a big, noble man, don't you ? You're proud to run his 
church, ain't you? You wouldn't beheve there was a 
time when I thought he was a big man, when I was kind 
of proud to Uve in the same city with him. SheHl tell 



FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH 219 

you how I used to come home from the store and talk 
about him after supper, and hope that the kid there 
would grow up into a financier Uke Eldon Parr. The 
boys at the store talked about him : he sort of laid hold 
on our imaginations with the Hbrary he gave, and Elm- 
wood Park, and the picture of the big organ in your 
church in the newspapers — and sometimes, Mary and 
me and the boy, in the baby carriage, on Sunday after- 
noons we used to walk around by his house, just to look 
at it. You couldn't have got me to beHeve that Eldon 
Parr would put his name to anything that wasn't straight. 
^^'Then ConsoHdated Tractions came along, with 
Parr's name behind it. Everybody was talking about 
it, and how it was payin' eight per cent, from the start, 
and extra dividends and all, and what a marvel of finance 
it was. Before the kid came, as soon as I married her, 
we began to save up for him. We didn't go to the the- 
aters or nothing. Well, I put it all, five thousand dol- 
lars, into ConsoHdated. She'll tell you how we sat up 
half the night after we got the first dividend talking 
about how we'd send the kid to college, and after we 
went to bed we couldn't sleep. It wasn't more than a 
year after that we began to hear things — and we 
couldn't sleep for sure, and the dividends stopped and 
the stock tumbled. Even then I wouldn't believe it of 



220 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

him, that he'd take poor people's money that way when 
he had more than he knew what to do with. I made up 
my mind if I went down to see him and told him about 
it, he'd make it right. I asked the boss for an hour off, 
and headed for the Parr building — I've been there as 
much as fifty times since — but he don't bother with 
small fry. The clerks laugh when they see me coming. 
I got sick worryin', and when I was strong enough to be 
around they'd filled my job at the grocery, and it wasn't 
long before we had to move out of our Kttle home in 
Alder Street. We've been movin' ever since,' he cried, 
and tears of weakness were in his eyes, ^ until we've come 
to this J and we'll have to get out of here in another week. 
God knows where we'll go then. 

*^ ' Then I found out how he done it — from a lawyer. 
The lawyer laughed at me, too. Say, do you wonder I 
ain't got much use for your church people ? Parr got a 
corporation lawyer named Langmaid — he's another one 
of your milhonaire crooks — to fix it up and get around 
the law and keep him out of jail. And then they had to 
settle with Tom Beatty for something like three hun- 
dred thousand. You know who Beatty is — he owns 
this city — his saloon's around here on Elm Street. 
All the crooks had to be squared. Say,' he demanded 
aggressively, 'are Parr and Langmaid any better than 



FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH 221 

Beatty, or any of the hold-up men Beatty covers? 
There's a street-walker over there in those flats that's 
got a milKon times more chance to get to heaven — if 
there is any — than those financiers, as they call 'em- 
selves ! I ain't much on high finance, but I've got some 
respect for a second story man now — he takes some 
risks ! I'll tell you what they did, they bought up the 
short car lines that didn't pay and sold 'em to themselves 
for fifty times as much as they were worth ; and they 
got controlling interests in the big lines and leased 'em 
to themselves with dividends guaranteed as high as 
eighteen per cent. They capitaUzed the ConsoHdated 
for more milKons than a Kttle man like me can think of, 
and we handed 'em our money because we thought 
they were honest. We thought the men who listed the 
stock on the Exchange were honest. And when the 
crash came, they'd got away with the swag, like any 
common housebreakers. There were dummy directors, 
and a dummy president. Eldon Parr didn't have a 
share — sold out everything when she went over two 
hundred, but you bet he kept his stock in the leased lines, 
which guarantee more than they earn. He cleaned up 
five milKon, they say. . . . My money — the money 
that might give that boy fresh air, and good doctors. . . 
Say, you believe in hell, don't you? You tell Eldon 



222 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

Parr to keep his charity, — he can't send any of it here. 
And you'd better go back to that church of his and pray 
to keep his soul out of hell.'" 

As I have said the second part is more abstract. It 
isn't so easy to draw worthily the individual saint as it 
is the individual sinner : for the sinner is small, with 
sharp outlines and clear-cut angles ; while the man who 
lives in Good Will is large, symmetrical, well rounded, 
and therefore a difl&cult subject for a striking portrait. 
Even in abstract description, however, the true church 
and churchman tower above the mean manipulator 
of securities, the donor of parks, playgrounds, libraries 
and settlement houses with money wrung from the 
plunder of the poor. I cite his long attempt to describe 
the true church, as a vague feeling after rather than a 
definite finding of the church as the fellowship of Gqod 
Will. 

^^He began by referring to the hope with which he had 
come to St. John's and the gradual realization that the 
church was a failure — a dismal failure when compared 
to the high ideal of her Master. By her fruits she should 
be known and judged. From the first he had contem- 
plated, with a heavy heart, the sin and misery at their 
very gates. Not three blocks distant children were learn- 
ing vice in the streets, little boys of seven and eight, 



FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH 223 

underfed and anaemic, were driven out before dawn to 
sell newspapers, little girls thrust forth to haunt the 
saloons and beg, while their own children were warmed 
and fed. While their own daughters were guarded, 
young women in Dalton Street were forced to sell them- 
selves into a life which meant slow torture, inevitable 
early death. Hopeless husbands and wives were cast 
up Kke driftwood by the cruel, resistless flood of modern 
civilization — the very civiHzation which yielded their 
wealth and luxury ; the civiUzation which professed the 
Spirit of Christ, and yet was pitiless. 

^' He confessed to them that for a long time he had been 
blind to the truth, had taken the inherited, unchristian 
view that the disease which caused vice and poverty 
might not be cured, though its ulcers might be alleviated. 
He had not, indeed, clearly perceived and recognized 
the disease. He had regarded Dalton Street in a very 
special sense as a reproach to St. John's, but now he saw 
that all such neighborhoods were in reality a reproach to 
the city, to the state, to the nation. True Christianity 
and Democracy were identical, and the congregation of 
St. John's, as professed Christians and citizens, were 
doubly responsible, inasmuch as they not only made no 
protest or attempt to change a government which 
permitted the Dalton Streets to exist, but inasmuch 



224 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

also as, — directly or indirectly, — they derived a profit 
from conditions which were an abomination to God. 
It would be but an idle mockery for them to go and 
build a settlement house, if they did not first reform 
their lives. 

^' When he, their rector, had gone to Dalton Street to 
invite the poor and wretched into God's Church, he was 
met by the scornful question: ^Are the Christians of 
the churches any better than we? Christians own the 
grim tenements in which we live, the saloons and brothels 
by which we are surrounded, which devour our chil- 
dren. Christians own the establishments which pay us 
starvation wages ; profit by poKtics, and take toll from 
our very vice ; evade the laws and reap millions, while 
we are sent to jail. Is their God a God who will lift us 
out of our misery and distress? Are their churches for 
the poor? Are not the very pews in which they sit as 
closed to us as their houses ? ' 

^' One inevitable conclusion of such a revelation was that 
he had not preached to them the vital element of Chris- 
tianity. And the very fact that his presentation of re- 
Kgion had left many indifferent or dissatisfied was proof 
positive that he had dwelt upon non-essentials, laid 
emphasis upon the mistaken interpretations of past 
ages. There were those within the Church who were 



FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH 225 

content with this, who — Kke the Pharisees of old — 
welcomed a religion which did not interfere with their 
complacency, with their pursuit of pleasure and wealth, 
with their special privileges ; welcomed a church which 
didn't raise her voice against the manner of their lives — 
against the order, the Golden Calf which they had set 
up, which did not accuse them of deUberately retarding 
the coming of the Kingdom of God. 

^^ Ah, that religion was not religion, for religion was a 
spiritual, not a material affair. In that religion, vainly 
designed by man as a compromise between God and 
Mammon, there was none of the divine discontent of 
the true reHgion of the Spirit, no need of the rebirth of 
the soul. And those who held it might well demand, with 
Nicodemus and the rulers of the earth, ^How can these 
things be?' 

'' Truth might no longer be identified with Tradition, 
and the day was past when councils and synods might 
determine it for all mankind. The era of forced ac- 
ceptance of philosophical doctrines and dogmas was 
past, and that of freedom, of spiritual rebirth, of vicari- 
ous suffering, of willing sacrifice and service for a Cause 
was upon them. That cause was Democracy, Christ 
was uniquely the Son of God because he had Hved and 
suffered and died in order to reveal to the world the mean- 

Q 



226 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

ing of this life and of the hereafter — the meaning not 
only for the individual, but for society as well. Noth- 
ing might be added to or subtracted from that message 

— it was complete. 

^' True faith was simply trusting — trusting that Christ 
gave to the world the revelation of God's plan. And 
the Savior himself had pointed out the proof : ' If any 
man do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether 
it be of God, or whether I speak for myself.' Christ 
had repeatedly rebuked those literal minds which had 
demanded material evidence : true faith spurned it, 
just as true friendship, true love between man and man, 
true trust scorned a written bond. To paraphrase St. 
James' words, faith without trust is dead — because 
faith without trust is impossible. God is a Spirit, only 
to be recognized in the Spirit, and every one of the 
Savior's utterances were — not of the flesh, of the man 

— but of the Spirit within him. ^He that hath seen 
me hath seen the Father'; and ^Why callest thou me 
good ? none is good save one, that is God ' ; the Spirit, 
the Universal Meaning of Life, incarnate in the human 
Jesus. 

'^ To be born again was to overcome our spiritual blind- 
ness, and then, and then only, we might behold the Spirit 
shining in the soul of Christ. 



FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH 227 

" The secret, then, lay in a presentation of the divine 
message which would convince and transform and elec- 
trify those who heard it to action — a presentation of the 
message in terms which the age could grasp. 

^' No man might venture to predict the details of the 
future organization of the united Church, although St. 
Paul himself had sketched it in broad outline: every 
worker, lay and clerical, labouring according to his 
gift, teachers, executives, ministers, visitors, mission- 
aries, healers of sick and despondent souls. But the 
supreme function of the Church was to inspire — to 
inspire individuals to wilHng service for the cause, the 
cause of Democracy, the fellowship of mankind. If she 
failed to inspire, the Church would wither and perish. 
And therefore she must revive again the race of in- 
spirers, prophets, modern Apostles to whom this gift 
was given, going on their rounds, awaking cities and 
arousing whole country-sides. 

'' But whence — it might be demanded by the cynical 
— were the prophets to come ? Prophets could not be 
produced by training and education ; prophets must be 
born. Reborn, — that was the word. Let the Church 
have faith. Once her Cause were perceived, once her 
whole energy were directed towards its fulfilment, the 
prophets would arise, out of the East and out of the 



228 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

West, to stir mankind to higher effort, to denounce 
fearlessly the shortcomings and evils of the age. They 
had not failed in past ages, when the world had fallen 
into hopelessness, indifference and darkness. And they 
would not fail now. 

^^ The meaning of Ufe,.then, was service, and by life our 
Lord did not mean mere human existence, which is only 
a part of Hfe. The Kingdom of heaven is a state, and 
may begin here. And that which we saw around us was 
only one expression of that eternal life — a medium to 
work through, towards God. ' All was service, both here 
and hereafter, and he that had not discovered that the 
joy of service was the only happiness worth living for 
could have no conception of the Kingdom. To those who 
knew, there was no happiness like being able to say, 'I 
have found my place in God's plan, / am ofuse.^ Such 
was salvation." 

The essential contrast between the church of Eldon 
Parr and the new Church Universal, as here set forth, 
is the contrast between a church composed of plunderers 
of the weak and poor, and a church devoted to the ser- 
vice of the Good Will which includes and cares for the 
humblest and most defenceless of our brothers and sisters. 

In preceding chapters we have said nothing about the 
Church, the Bible, the Sabbath, the Sacraments, public 



FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH 229 

worship, prayer, missions, or the ministry as a con- 
secrated order. Without any of these aids Good Will 
may be done, the Kingdom may come, through the 
obedience of individuals and their informal cooperation 
with each other. Not until we recognize this fact can 
we appreciate the real mission and true value of these 
agencies. They have no magical virtue or mysterious 
efficacy in and of themselves ; and the claim that they 
have brings them into deserved disrepute. Apart from 
them all a man may live in and by and for Good Will ; 
and if he does he is a Christian. To deny him that 
title, and to insist on something more as essential is to 
miss the whole point of the Gospel of Good Will. Who- 
ever doeth that Will is brother and sister and mother of 
Christ; though he never enter a church, or open a 
Bible, or say a verbal prayer, or partake of the sacra- 
ments, or do or refrain from doing a single thing on 
Sunday which he would not do or refrain from doing on 
the other days of the week. 

Still, while not essential as ends, all these things are 
precious means of keeping alive in one's own heart, and 
enkindling in the hearts of others, the love and service 
of Good Will. There is no other important interest or 
enthusiasm that attempts to dispense with organized 
association. Athletics, business, Kterature, history, art, 



230 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

science, banking, engineering, manufacture, agriculture, 
education, labor, all have their clubs, associations, con- 
ferences, conventions, organized locally, nationally and 
many of them internationally. For the same reason 
men and women who enjoy Good Will desire to share it 
with each other ; profit by each other's experience and 
insight; provide for its communication to their chil- 
dren, and its extension to those outside its fold. Worth- 
less, positively mischievous, spiritually deadly, when set 
up as an end in itself, the church as a means of fellow- 
ship in Good Will is so natural, so useful, so necessary, 
that practically all who have that Will at heart, and see 
the church as the provision for its expression and prop- 
agation; unless prevented by some false attitude on 
its part, or some misunderstanding on their own part; 
will desire to share and support its worship and its work. 
One of the preacher's most important tasks is to 
protect the church from the misconceptions which have 
arisen about it. When a convert asked Billy Sunday 
"Do I have to join the church?" he replied, "No, you 
don't have to take a steamer to go to Europe. The 
swimming is good." Neither the steamer nor the church 
is helped by attributing to it a magical value of its own : 
its value as an instrument to ends greater than itself is 
in each case ample justification. Joining the church is 



FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL! THE CHURCH 23 1 

the normal and usual corollary of accepting Good Will 
as the support and guide of Ufe. But to preach the 
church as the main proposition, is to obscure the great 
spiritual issues which it is its function to proclaim. To 
increase men's faith and obedience and trust in Good 
Will should be the preacher's single aim; and if that 
aim be genuine and effective, additions to membership 
in the visible organization which represents it will follow 
as warmth follows sunshine. But to aim at member- 
ship directly for its own sake, is like attempting to warm 
a room by breathing on the bulb of the thermometer. 

Christian unity consists in community of Good Will : 
the sense of oneness of aim that binds together all who 
are striving for the common good. It tends toward 
church unity : yet is not dependent on it, and need not 
be postponed until church unity is realized. 

In so far as racial, cultural, or temperamental differ- 
ences call for different social, intellectual, and devotional 
expression Good Will welcomes and supports diversity 
in poUty, doctrine and worship. In so far as economy 
and efl&ciency demand centraUzation, as they certainly 
do in rural regions. Good Will calls for church union, or 
at least church federation. 

So long as denominational differences last, the member 
of a denominational church, if he is full of Good Will, 



232 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

will have the feeling toward his denomination that a 
soldier has toward his particular company : — some- 
thing a Kttle more intimate than his feeling for the army, 
yet entirely subordinate to that. He will expect the 
soldiers of other companies to be as loyal to their 
companies as he is to his : when the good of the service 
requires it he will readily transfer his membership to 
another company, and welcome men from other com- 
panies to his own: cherishing as the deepest bond of 
unity loyalty to the army as a whole of which the several 
companies are merely constituent parts. Good Will is 
inclusive, not divisive ; and in due time will develop the 
outward unity all its children so eagerly desire. 

The Bible is not infallible; not everything in it is 
scientific, historical, or even final moral truth. Good 
Will came into the world before the Bible; made the 
history the Bible records ; lived the life the Bible por- 
trays ; and is as much bigger, stronger, richer than the 
Bible as facts are bigger than records; as deeds are 
stronger than words ; as life is richer than letters. 

The moment we see this, however, we begin to see how 
marvellous a help the Bible is to all who seek to live in 
Good Will. Once we get a vital, first-hand impulse to 
Good Will from a living person or group of persons, 
who are doing it; then the example, the teaching, the 



FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH 233 

spirit of those who lived this Kfe long ago, comes with 
an inspiration, an encouragement, an illumination which 
throws floods of light on the path Good Will now calls us 
to follow. The Bible is more helpful than the precepts 
and illustrations of modern doers of Good Will, because 
of the greater freshness and simplicity of characters and 
situations ; because of the more thorough winnowing of 
essentials from non-essentials wrought by time and 
art. In these writings, not preserved by miracle from 
the incidental errors and limitations of the times in which 
they were composed, but cherished with reverent affec- 
tion by three score generations of men, there is such a 
clearness of issue between Good Will and the evil forces 
that are opposed to it, that we get a sharpness of out- 
line, a naivete, which no later literature has been able 
to approach. The same spirit animates these writings 
that animates the words and deeds, the songs and 
speeches, the letters and discourses of Christian men 
to-day : but in them this spirit shines through a far more 
transparent medium, and is obstructed by less irrelevant 
detail. Furthermore the Bible contains the original 
records of the words and deeds, the life and death, of 
the great Master of Good Will, and the acts and writings 
of those who caught their inspiration from him at first 
hand. 



234 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

A man can be a Christian without reading the Bible : 
he can be a much better one by reading it : and, other 
things being equal, the more he reads and reflects upon 
it the better Christian he will be. It is, and will remain 
forever, the supreme literature of Good Will. The 
unique supremacy of the Bible is best maintained 
by a frank and thorough criticism which abandons 
all false defences ; admits all sorts of hiunan blemishes ; 
and in spite of them all; yes, on account of them 
all, sees there a transparent revelation of the glory 
of Good Will; which we more sophisticated moderns 
seem powerless to achieve. Put the Bible on its in- 
trinsic merits; and it will fare better and rank higher 
than it ever has under the claims of a miraculous in- 
falhbiKty. A preacher who does not know his Bible as 
a mathematician knows his multipHcation table; and 
who does not use its examples, its precepts, its phrases, 
as constantly, will miss his best material for illustration 
and inspiration. 

The Sabbath likewise is a dreary end ; a most useful 
and helpful means. It is the great opportunity to re- 
member, reenforce and express Good Will. The Sab- 
bath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, as 
Jesus emphatically declares. 

Ordinarily there are better things than work or 



FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILLI THE CHURCH 235 

play for Sunday. Rest, change, simple social inter- 
course, neighborly helpfulness, reading, reflection, wor- 
ship, prayer, are better for the individual and for society 
than a continuation of the labors and sports of the 
week days; and therefore Good Will invites to these 
Sabbath occupations all who seek its fullest fellowship 
in highest consecration. Not that work and play 
on that day are intrinsically and universally bad; or 
that the clerk or bookkeeper kept at his desk all the 
week should not have his game of golf or tennis on Sun- 
day afternoon : but that friendliness and rest, meditation 
and worship are ordinarily better : — that is the general 
ground on which Good Will claims that these better 
things shall have first place in our plans for Sabbath 
observance. Because a worshipful Sunday is helpful 
to that individual and social well-being which is the ob- 
ject of Good Will ; and a secular Sunday is injurious to 
individual and social well-being ; therefore the highest 
type of Christian will aim as a rule to put worship into 
his Sunday plans and keep distraction out. 

Friendship has its hand clasp : affection its kiss : all 
sorts of clubs, associations and fraternities have their 
initiations and banquets. In all these cases the things 
done are not essential; nor possessed of mysterious 
efficacy. They are outward and visible symbols of an 



236 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

inner loyalty and devotion. Yet few friends refuse to 
shake hands; few lovers dispense with the kiss; few 
fraternities or orders omit all rites and ceremonies. 

The sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper 
bear a similar relation to fellowship in Good Will. Of 
themselves they are nothing; but taken in faith; in 
other words, regarded as seals, symbols and signs of 
our fellowship with Christ in Good Will, our gratitude 
and our devotion to him, they give a public confession, 
a social recognition, to this fellowship which make it 
at once more intimate and more objective. One can be 
a Christian without them ; as a friend can be a friend 
without ever shaking hands ; or as a lover can be a lover 
without ever kissing his beloved. But one can be a 
more assured; a more influential; a more sociable; 
a more substantial Christian by accepting and utilizing 
the symbols which reach across the seas and the cen- 
turies and link us to Christ, and to all who have received 
these symbols from him, or his appointed representa- 
tives. 

Public worship is not essential to that Good Will in 
which Christianity consists. One can be a Christian 
without it. Yet if one is in earnest about Good Will ; 
he will desire from time to time to call it consciously to 
mind ; reconsecrate himself to its service ; and share his 



FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH 237 

enthusiasm for it with like-minded men and women. 
That is precisely the opportunity which public worship 
affords. The congregation and each individual is lifted 
into an attitude and atmosphere in which Good Will is 
held as the supreme object of reverence and service; 
the supreme guide to aspiration and conduct. One who 
habitually enters into this attitude and atmosphere will 
develop Good Will and express it toward others, far 
more effectively, systematically and persistently than one 
who depends on its fortuitous occurrence to his individ- 
ual mind and heart. As the years, the decades, the 
generations pass, the man and the family that unites 
in public worship will become very different from the 
man and the family that do not reenforce the chance 
promptings of the heart by this systematic means. 
One can be so much better a Christian with than without 
such aid ; that he who deliberately neglects it, choosing 
as he does less rather than more of the power of Good 
Will over his Ufe, finds the little Christianity that he 
has fast slipping away from him; and spiritual bank- 
ruptcy staring him in the face. 

Even verbal prayer likewise is not of the essence of 
Christianity. As Jesus repeatedly tells us, a man who 
does Good Will without ever consciously saying ^Xord, 
Lord/' is better far than the man who is explicitly 



238 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

prayerful but disobedient. To the men of silent obedience 
admission to the Kingdom may come as a great sur- 
prise to themselves ; and a great shock to their orthodox 
critics ; but we have Jesus' word and our own insight 
that it surely comes. Yet a man is very foolish who 
does not pray. As Arthur Balfour once said at the 
conclusion of a long and rather inconsequential dis- 
cussion on prayer, ^'But to be at his best a man must 
pray." Prayer is a device for keeping our thoughts, 
our aims, our words, our acts, consciously under the 
guidance and control of Good Will. It is about as 
necessary to the best Christian living as contact with 
the wire Is to an electric car. The car may move in 
the desired direction without such a contact; but its 
movement under such chance propulsion will be fitful, 
costly, insignificant, unreliable. A Christian conceiv- 
ably might serve Good Will without praying; but his 
service would be intermittent and spasmodic. Who- 
ever is deeply in earnest about Good Will, will be eager 
to keep it clear before his mind, warm in his heart, com- 
pelKng behind his will ; and prayer is the approved de- 
vice for doing these things. 

Prayer is not a blank check on omnipotence, by pre- 
senting which, properly endorsed, anybody can secure 
anything he happens to want, and is willing to 



FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH 239 

ask for in that form. Petition is a proper part of 
prayer — even petition for specific things ; just as 
petition is a perfectly proper part of the intercourse 
between friends; but it is not the principal part. A 
friend whose chief relation to us consisted in asking for 
this or that special favor or specific object, would not be 
one whose disinterested devotion we should rate very 
high; or even one whose friendship we should care to 
keep. Precisely so, if we have not risen above making 
prayer primarily a means to gaining this or that specific 
favor; we are not on very honorable terms with God 
and his Good Will. God is not mocked : and if we get 
little from such prayer, we get all we deserve. Prayer 
is primarily communion, fellowship; mind with mind; 
leart to heart ; will with will. Incidentally it doubtless 
Las other effects: but its chief effect is the filling the 
mind and heart and will of him who prays so full of 
Good Will, that by his resulting action Good Will is 
done, as apart from the prayer it would not be done. 
Not my will but Good Will is what in true prayer we 
most desire. It seeks the positive presence and power of 
Good Will in us, doing through us and for us, what we 
alone, or trusting to chance influence, could not or would 
not do. 

Undertaken in pride of race, or pride of opinion, or 



240 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

pride of superior virtue, missions are an injury alike to 
missionary and convert: but undertaken in the desire 
to give the best we have in moral motive, in spiritual 
comfort, in medical skill, in industrial arts, in intellectual 
interest and power, missions are so essential and con- 
summate an expression of Good Will, that no preacher 
who fails to preach them, and to train his people to 
support them, appreciates what Good Will requires of 
those who would share in its world-wide application. 
If that Will is good for me, it is good for my neighbor : 
if it is good for my section of the city, it is good for every 
section of the city : if it is good for my old and settled 
community, it is good for the frontier town : if it is good 
for my country and my race, it is good for every country 
under heaven, and for all the races of the earth. Granted 
that Good Will begins at home, and is mainly expressed 
in secular vocations and domestic and local services : 
yet if my will stops anywhere short of the ends of the 
earth it is not Good Will which I am seeking and serving. 
To carry Good Will where there is most ill will, where 
the actual situation is most painful, is to come closest 
to it, to share it most, and serve it best. The Gospel 
of Good Will requires more sacrifice than the doctrine 
of the eternal damnation of the heathen ever did. 
The depth and extent of missionary contribution and 



FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH 241 

devotion, not as a thing apart from secular and home ser- 
vice or as a substitute for it ; but as its crown and con- 
summation, will ever be one of the best tests of Good Will. 
The minister is no more essential to Good Will than are 
Church, Bible, Sacrament and Sabbath. There is no 
miraculously imparted grace of which the priesthood is 
the custodian and distributer. The minister is the 
guardian, exponent and teacher of that life in and for 
Good Will which is common to minister and layman. 
The minister is related to Good Will in precisely the same 
way as the butcher is related to meat, or the carpenter 
to houses, or the shoemaker to shoes. The butcher 
eats meat, the carpenter Kves in a house, the shoe- 
maker wears shoes the same as do other men. But in 
addition the butcher provides meat, the carpenter 
houses, the shoemaker shoes for other men. They 
are simply the speciaUzed agents, set apart to provide 
these commodities. Precisely so the minister lives in, 
and by, and for Good Will the same as other Christian 
men. But in addition to doing that Will for himself, 
he shows his fellows how to see it, and do it, and enjoy 
it. He judges himself and all men by the standard of 
that Will: points out its applications: exhorts to the 
sacrifices it requires: imparts to all who live in it the 
hope and comfort it contains. 



242 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

Just because the function in which he speciaKzes is 
so precious and vital, the insight requisite is so keen, 
and the character required to present and represent it 
worthily is so high, the ministry is a highly honorable 
profession : but its honor rests on no mysterious superi- 
ority. It rests simply and solidly on the worth to the 
individual and to society of knowing, loving and serving 
Good Will. 

The minister is simply the man who is set apart by 
society to keep vivid the vision, and active the service, by 
others as well as by himself, of Good Will. If he does 
that work well he is entitled to such salary as will give him 
the tools, the freedom, and the connections required for 
doing his best ; and to the honor that is due to an impor- 
tant social service cheerfully and effectively rendered. 

But he will keep closest to his Master, and come clos- 
est to men the less he thinks of the honor, and the pro- 
fessional standing he shares with the lawyer and the 
physician ; and the more he thinks of the social service 
rendered, and the spirit of service he shares with the 
Christian butcher, the Christian carpenter and the 
Christian shoemaker. The minister like his Master 
should think of himself chiefly as one who serves. 

Other vocations offer larger remuneration, higher 
honors, more conspicuous careers : but none offers more 



FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL! THE CHURCH 243 

close companionship with God, or more vital relations 
with one's fellow-men ; none renders more valuable ser- 
vice for the ennobling of individuals, the upbuilding of 
institutions, the heahng of the nations, and the redemp- 
tion of the world. 

This Gospel of Good Will carries with it momentous 
implications. If this is true, many other things supposed 
to be true and important are false or trivial. Good 
Will is not called upon to go out of its way to tear down 
these trivial falsehoods. It patiently waits to see them 
fall down as soon as the sufficiency of the Gospel of Good 
Will is established. Is then this Gospel of Good Will 
true and sufficient? 

The tests are pragmatic. Does it make men Chris- 
tians? Does it make earth heaven? These tests we 
may now apply. 

A man, in response to Christ's expectation, acquires 
and maintains the habit of spending his money, control- 
ling his appetites and passions, choosing peace or strife, 
and making every other decision with an eye single to 
the greatest good of all who are affected ; as the Father 
who loves all his children will. 

Every thought or deed or word that falls below that 
generous aim he scorns as meanness unworthy of him, 
and repents as sin. 



244 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL 

All men who fall into meanness or sin, the instant they 
are ashamed and sorry he forgives; and therein finds 
assurance that God and Christian men likewise forgive 
his own sins, and restore him to their favor. 

He chooses and fulfils his vocation with a justice and 
generosity which make the interest of client, customer, 
consumer as precious to him as his own. 

He pays whatever price of sacrifice such disinterested 
devotion to universal good in a world still largely evil 
may require ; accepting that cost as his portion of the 
cross of Christ. 

He thinks little about his own character, his own vir- 
tues, his own salvation even : but trusts the Good Will 
he has toward others to enlarge and enrich his soul into 
the stature and Kkeness of Christ. 

Where good and evil are mixed, with some of each on 
both sides of disputed questions, he appreciates the good 
and opposes the evil in both ; giving his influence to the 
one where, all things considered, he finds most good and 
least evil. 

He joins and supports the church, cherishes its lit- 
erature, its sacraments, its times and seasons, its wor- 
ship, its missions, its ministry, not slavishly or super- 
stitiously, but freely and gladly as the appointed agencies 
for keeping alive and handing on the Gospel of Good Will. 



FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH 245 

A man who believes and lives this Gospel, whatever 
else he may believe or not believe, do or refrain from 
doing, is a Christian. 

Wherever and to whatever extent this Gospel is 
preached and practised, no matter what the racial, 
intellectual, social, economic or poKtical status, there 
and to that extent earth becomes a household of heaven. 

These fruits the Gospel of Good Will, when clearly 
preached and faithfully practised, brings forth : and on 
this power to make men Christian, and earth heaven, 
it rests its claim to be the true Gospel of our Lord and 
Savior Jesus Christ. 



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Dr. Cadman's opinion, are the foremost leaders in religious 
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" Many prophets, priests and kings,'* writes Dr. Cadman, 
"have been nourished within her borders, but none who in 
significance and contribution to the general welfare compare 
with Wycliffe, the real originator of European Protestantism ; 
Wesley, the Anglican priest who became the founder of 
Methodism and one of the makers of modern England and of 
English speaking nations ; Newman, the spiritual genius of 
his century, who reinterpreted Catholicism, both Anglican and 
Roman." 

Why Men Pray 

By CHARLES LEWIS SLATTERY 

Rector of Grace Church, New York City 

Cloth, i2mo, ?.75 
Dr. Slattery defines prayer roughly as " talking with the 
unseen." In his book he does not argue about prayer but 
rather sets down in as many chapters six convictions which 
he has concerning it. These convictions are, first, that all men 
pray ; second, that prayer discovers God, that, in other words, 
when men become conscious of their prayer they find them- 
selves standing face to face with one whom in a flash they 
recognize as God ; third, prayer unites men ; fourth, God de- 
pends on men's prayer ; fifth, prayer submits to the best; and 
sixth, prayer receives God. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

FubliBhers 64-66 Tifth Avenue New Tork 



NEW BOOKS ON RELIGION 

What Jesus Christ Thought of Himself 

By ANSON PHELPS STOKES 

Cloth, i2mo, $1.00 
The purpose of this book is to show in clear, compact form 
and in untechnical language what any intelligent student of 
the New Testament may find out for himself as to Jesus' view 
of his own person. A secondary purpose has been to interpret 
this self-revealed personality. The author divides his discus- 
sion into two main parts : The Human Side of Jesus Christ and 
The Divine Side of Jesus Christ. Under the former he takes 
up Christ's consciousness of his limitations, his consciousness 
that he was representing another and his consciousness of his 
subordination in prayer. Under the latter he considers Christ 
as Master of the Past, Master of the Present, and Master of 
the Future. The book concludes with a chapter on the rec- 
onciliation of the human and the divine elements. 

The Centennial History of the American 
Bible Society 

By henry OTIS D WIGHT, LL.D. 

Recording Secretary of the Society 

In two volumes. Cloth, 8vo 
The American Bible Society was organized in May, 1816. 
Its work has been so interwoven with the development of the 
American republic that there will be felt a very general in- 
terest in this account of its one hundred years of existence. 
This has been prepared by the Recording Secretary, who, for 
many months, has been engaged in gathering the necessary 
data and in writing the narrative. The volume will be found 
full of information not only as to the history of the society 
but also as to the results achieved in its distribution of the 
Scriptures throughout this country and in the far ends of the 
earth. 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Fttblishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



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